The Person (I should have been)
by Fish Wishes
Summary: Down on the ground, the 100 are their own worst enemy. But it seems as if they keep forgetting that. (Diverges after "Day Trip")
1. Chapter One

**Edited: **10/2015

* * *

**Summary:** Down on the ground, the 100 are their own worst enemy. But it seems as if they keep forgetting it. (Diverges after "Day Trip")

**Trigger warning:** This story deals with mature themes such as aggressive violence, sexual assault, and rape.

**Blanket Disclaimer:** I don't own it, and I make no profit.

* * *

**The Person (I should have been)  
Chapter One  
**"But she's wrong about hell. You don't have to wait until you're dead to get there."  
Susan Beth Pfeffer, _Life as We Knew It_

* * *

Fog enveloping the camp creates blue shadows out of the tents and muffles laughter to whispers carried by water droplets. People cluster around flickering fires and none of the guards carry guns today—not when it would be too easy to mistake a friend for foe, or a tree for that matter. Clarke stands by Donna, a girl of fourteen years old who was arrested for illegal trading. Her sobs are punctuated by gasps for air and whimpers, but the cold interior of the drop ship echoes her despair. Clarke focuses on the slab of metal where Finn lay dying a week ago. Donna's skinny legs dangle over the edge and her red hair is braided to the side.

Clarke thinks Octavia would know how to comfort this child. How to wrap her in a hug or murmur comforting words, but not Clarke. She could only rest her hand on Donna's knee and bow her head, allowing the once-smuggler to weep in the only place one could find privacy in a world of cloth walls.

Someone enters the drop ship, but apologizes and back out before Clarke can tell them to leave. It takes a few more sniffles and choking sobs before Donna is calm enough to drink the water offered.

"Have you noticed any other changes?" Clarke prompts. "Although you've missed your period, there are other explanations. Not getting the proper nutrients or being under a lot of stress can cause a woman to skip a month."

Donna's eyes look down at the muddy floor. Clarke wonders if maybe she should try to keep the drop ship cleaner, but with dozens of people going through each day, it seems ridiculous to try. Donna hunches and mumbles. Frowning, Clarke has her repeat what she said.

"My breasts have been really sore. I mean, I know they ain't much, but they hurt. Same with my back." Donna blushes.

Clarke nods, unperturbed. "Okay, anything else?"

"Just been tired a lot, is all."

The caress of the rain fills the drop ship. It sounds like two hands rubbing together to keep warm. Clarke looks towards the plastic covering the door. No-one has come in yet, and she doubts their privacy will last much longer.

"Hey, why don't we go up to the top. No-one will bother us there, okay?" she says. Donna nods and slips off the table. She is knobby knees and long arms and too young—like Charlotte or any of the 100. "I'll meet you up there; don't touch the guns, okay?" Clarke says. She watches the girl climb up the ladder before turning to find Bellamy.

He's waiting right outside the drop ship, water clinging to his eye lashes and his hair frizzing from the humidity. His arms are crossed and he stares down a collection of people, keeping them from entering. A few stare back, but most just shuffle closer to another or go find a tent with waterproof material to share. Bellamy sees Clarke and steps to the side.

"Alright, go ahead," he says to the crowd. They grumble and retreat inside the drop ship, but no one challenges him. The fog has lightened enough that standing at the entrance, Clarke can see the expanse of camp. The wall juts at irregular areas from poor design. She doesn't say anything to Bellamy as people trickle in. One person stops to ask if she could check on him later because he's been feeling dizzy. She smiles and nods and gets the guy to leave.

"We have a problem," Clarke says, pulling her hair off her neck and twisting it into a bun.

"You're gunna have to be more specific than that because we've got _several _problems," Bellamy scoffs and steps down from the ramp. Clarke follows. The slip-resistant strips prevent her from sliding the last few feet to the mucky ground.

Bellamy leads them to the side of the drop ship. Mud squishes over the sides of his soles and clotting along the ridges of his damp boots.

Clarke rubs at her eyes and whispers, "That girl I was seeing, she might be pregnant and—"

"So?" He stands facing her. His shoulders tense up and he lowers his head, looking prepared to charge. "That's a good thing, _princess_."

Clarke doesn't—can't—speak. The mist becomes a drizzle. Her hair tickles the inside of her ear. His eyes look like the earth dug up, exposed and angry. "For real, Bellamy?" she huff and steps closer. Octavia's laughter ripples through camp. He's not 21 with a mop as his daily companion because his mother was floated and his sister was arrested. He isn't on the Ark where being second born is a crime. And Clarke isn't the counsel, here to pass judgment on a desperate mother. (That last one is easiest to believe.)

"It's not that she might be pregnant that's the problem. It's _how_ she got pregnant." She pushes Bellamy farther from the entrance of the drop ship.

He yields, but teases, "Don't tell me you still think the stork delivers the baby."

"No, but there's a consensual and non-consensual way of getting pregnant."

Bellamy grasps Clarke's wrist, pressing her father's watch into her skin. "Are you sure?" The muscle between his thumb and index finger bulges. _Thenar._ The name of the muscle group comes unbidden to her mind.

"Do you know who the real criminals are here—the dangerous ones?" she asks instead.

He shakes his head and lets go. "Some I do know from being a cadet, but after I got demoted…I didn't have access to that type of information." He presses his knuckles onto the side of the drop ship. Skin against steel. The rain coalesces into fat droplets that roll down from the canopy tinged yellow with fall.

"Okay." Clarke's eyes drift to the tents. Some had light, casting shadows of the occupants on the walls. Other are black, sleeping masses.

"I'll start with Murphy's old crew," Bellamy says, his voice rising out of the murky twilight like the howling of an owl.

"Let me know when you do." Clarke thinks about the grounder they tortured and knows they won't repeat the same mistake. Then, she thinks about Wells and how willing he was to help people who hated him. Charlotte and how she just wanted to hold Clarke's hand. She thinks about Murphy's sneer and grinds her teeth. "We do this together."

"Together," Bellamy agrees. It is no longer raining.

* * *

Clarke rips off the head set and throws it on the table. She squeezes her hands together and swallows all the bitter, hard words she choked on during her discussion about herbal birth control with her mother. She wanted to talk to Jackson, her mother's assistant. He would have sputtered and blushed and pushed around papers, but Clarke would have sat there, a tight smile on her lips as she waited for him to collect himself. But no, she got her mother:

"Dr. Griffin, can you please send information on herbal contraceptives."

"Clarke, have you—are you—I'm here if you need to talk—"

"Dr. Griffin, _several_ couples are interested in copulating, but understand the ramifications of such actions without proper planning."

"Oh right, but…are you? I mean, we never really got around to talking about it, but we can now if—"

"Mom, can you tell me what I need to know or not?"

"Um, yes, give me a moment…are you sure you don't want to talk about this?"

"Mom."

From there, it was professional and didn't broach upon the subject of Clarke's sex life. She wrote everything her mother said as well as detailed descriptions of the plants and where they are commonly found. Her mother warned that STDs were eradicated on the Ark, but it was still possible the delinquents could develop these diseases. Just one other thing the 100 to think about while they scramble for the next day's meal.

At the end of the call, the screen froze, showing Clarke a still of her mother. High cheek bones; thin lips; bags under her eyes. And then she remembers her father saying, "You look like her." Clarke hangs up before any fumbling attempts at saying goodbye can happen.

Static flicks across the empty screen. Watching the erratic spasms of radio waves settles Clarke's anger. She brushes quivering tears from her eye lashes and steps out from the curtain separating the radio from the rest of the drop ship. It provides the illusion of privacy for when someone wants to talk to their parents, but for Clarke it sometimes seems as if all privacy is an illusion here at camp. _And yet, I had no idea a girl was being sexually abused_, she thinks.

A brisk wind weaves through camp, fluttering tent flaps and fallen leaves alike. Most parts of the forest are still green, but she suspects those would _never _change. Other parts flood the tree tops with red and orange and gold. Sometimes a blush of pink. Between pages of her notebooks and journals, she stashes away her favorite leaves, hoping to preserve them for a time when she might try to mimic their colors and curves and veins.

She finds Jasper and Monty with others who are familiar with horticulture sorting through nuts, berries, and plants. They make sure nothing toxic slips into their food supplies again (they were lucky the nuts only caused hallucinations). She steps between them. They look up and smile at her. It's almost as if they're smiling at each other through her.

"I need your help with something," she says, peeling away brown casing at the base of some pine needles.

"Shoot!" Monty mimics a pistol fire with his hand. Mocking shock eases onto Jasper's face.

Their playfulness brushes around Clarke. She wants to smile. She can't. "Are you familiar with either lithosperumum or arisaema triphyllum?" Clarke stops to zip her jacket up. (Autumn or fall, it doesn't matter what you call it because it's still the season before ice and snow and frostbite. _Winter is coming,_ Bellamy and she say whenever they go through their meager supplies.)

"Yeah." Jasper turns his back to the table and leans towards her. "I thought you and Finn weren't rolling together anymore?"

She scoffs and throws a pine cone at him. "Why does everyone think it's for me?" She settles down. "So do you know what it is and what it's for, then?"

Monty nods, he rolls a walnut between his hands. They're stained black from peeling back the thick skin to reach the shell. "Yeah, we used to grow it along with cannabis for kids who couldn't get birth control."

"I thought it was automatically added to our meal pill," Clarke says. She rubs away sap on her fingers.

"Well, maybe in your sector of the Ark, but not in others. Sex was a luxury," Jasper sighs and then blushes, hair falling across his eyes. "I mean," he stutters and shuffles broken nut shells around the table. "Adding birth control to pills was expensive. It took up finite resources that ended up going to a privileged sector of the Ark. Just another class division."

He readjusts his goggles, realizes mid-way his implications, and rushes out, "But not that it's your fault or something, Clarke. Cause you know, just product of the environment. You didn't rig the system—" He squeezes his mouth shut. Clarke wonders how many ways he could apologize without saying sorry. Jasper groans and ends by saying, "But we don't have to worry about that type of stuff here."

Clarke scoffs, "I don't think we can ever stop worrying about it."

"Sex?" Monty leans against the table, weighing a walnut and blueberry in each hand.

"Class division?" Jasper adds.

"Babies," she clarifies, a weak smile on her face.

"Oh, yeah," the guys acknowledge, their facial expressions mirroring each other.

"Well, it shouldn't be a big deal. Both plants are pretty common." Monty throws the berry in the air and catches it in his mouth. His teeth have splotches on them the next time he smiles. "You're sure gunna boost your approval ratings with this idea!"

Jasper looks at Clarke's hands. They shake. "What else do you need?" he asks. He's familiar with the twitches of anxiety.

She glances down the rest of the table. Jordan laughs at something Evy said. They are the youngest delinquents, both eleven and accomplices in crime. They smuggled moonshine until they refused to deliver to a man on Phoenix who kept skipping payment—that was their crime, crossing the wrong person who had the right amount of pull. "Daucus carota or Polygonum. There were others, but I don't think they're native to the area we've landed in," she says.

"Queen Anne's Lace?" Monty leans into Clarke's line of sight. He crosses his arms. "Yeah, we know that one pretty well, too." Jasper stares at the ground. "Most awkward conversation I ever had with mom," he says, trying to lighten the mood. He avoids serious like he avoid grounders.

"You want us to keep it on the DL, boss?" Jasper asks, he focuses back on the black walnuts, peeling back their green skin.

"Yeah." Clarke nods. "I don't want people just taking it without my supervision. I don't know the complications that could arise.. A plant or two should be okay." She sighs, rubbing a pine needle between her fingers. If she ever had to explain to someone what life smelled like, she'd say the spice of pine cones and needles. "The other stuff is fine, though. That I need as much as possible or a way for us to grow it on our own," she says. Her voice rises to its normal level. She's stunned to realize her body knew to drop her speaking tone without a conscious thought.

Monty says, "You're the doctor—and a woman. We trust you."

Jasper agrees, his lopsided, twitching grin filling his face. "Let us know if we can help with anything else."

She grabs a handful of pine needles to put in her pillow because she needs to remember what life smells like. "Thanks guys," she says.

"Hey Clarke!" Monty jogs the steps between them. Jasper watches. "Look," he pushes his hands deep into his pockets. She can see the bulge of his fists. He maintains eye contact as he says, "The girl, who the Queen Anne's Lace is for…look, if she needs anything, let her know she can come to me, too. Like I said, my mom went through it and it was a hard process for her and I don't think I can stand knowing someone else is going through the same thing she went through."

Clarke licks her lips. "Yeah, Monty, of course."

He nods his head a few times and heaves out, "Well, see you around."

"Bye."

Jasper claps Monty on the back when he returns to the sorting table. They smile and keep working. Clarke goes back to the drop ship to eat lunch with Bellamy and to meet with Octavia on the census she started. To her, Donna's visit to Clarke and her new responsibility of gathering training experience and criminal history from each delinquent are isolated events. Clarke wishes they were.

* * *

They split a pawpaw between them. Bellamy slices it with his hatchet, juice dribbling down the blade. Octavia take her time picking out the slick, brown seeds. When Monroe and her scouts first came upon the cluster of pawpaw trees, with their large red flowers blooming and the fetid smell of rotting meat, she averted the area thinking it was some grounder kill zone. It wasn't until Richard, a guy who hacked his way into the Ark's point system instead of studying his agriculture books, overheard Monroe talking about it a week later and realized what she found.

Clarke uses her teeth to pull the meat away from the browning skin. They eat with their eyes down, savoring the sweetness as much as the silence. Boxes of ammunition garnered from the bunker fill most of the top floor of the drop ship now. Raven adds a new box every time she completes a dud-check. (More boxes are in her tent than here.) And out of the twenty-four guns stored in oil, only four are checked out. The guards on rotation sign their names on the wall with charcoal from the fire.

Octavia wipes her fingers on her pants and passes a sheet of paper to Clarke. There's 102 names. Fourteen are crossed off. The two newest graves were from this past week. Thomas fell into a grounder pit, impaled in one too many places for saving. Bellamy climbed down and held the boy's hand as fluid filled his lungs and he choked on his blood. Jose broke his wrist slipping on wet rocks. He staggered back to camp, his ulnar bone poking out. Clarke took Bellamy's hatchet, cut it off, and cauterized it. Jose died with Clarke's fingers pressed against his neck, feeling his pulse fade.

"Who'd you have write it?" Bellamy asks, gesturing to the paper.

Octavia doesn't look up from her slice of fruit. "Philip. He's the kid who tried to steal the Tree on the Ark."

Clarke pauses. "Why didn't you write it?" The letters are neat and in pen so it won't smudge.

"I don't know how to. I didn't go to classes. Remember? Lived under the floorboards. Arrested for being born."

Bellamy rips the skin of the pawpaw into a pile at his feet. He sits on a chair pried from the second floor. His forearms press into his knees; his head bowed.

Clarke clears her throat and looks back at the list. Her eyes ache so she asks instead, "Anyone suspicious?"

"We need to watch out for Harry, Fran, Lucus, and Erin. They were the ones who backed Murphy up. They were arrested for violent crimes, too. I know Quinn tends to be more handsy than a lot of the girl's appreciate," Bellamy says. He rubs at the stubble along his jaw. He tries to shave as often as possible because his beard comes in patchy, if at all. That's what he told Clarke when she found him scratching a knife along his neck. (She thought he was finishing what Dax set out to do, but didn't need to tell him because he saw it in the way she didn't look way from the knife until he was done shaving, and every time after that.)

"Quinn is just a flirt," Octavia defends, leaning back on the carpet of panther fur. Her hair blends into the shimmering black. Clarke can tell where the bullets Wells fired to killed the animal singed through.

Bellamy scoffs, his mouth twists into a sneer. Teeth barred and ready to fight. Clarke interrupts, "Thanks for this, Octavia. It'll be really helpful to make sure people are working in area they're most suited for." She isn't looking at the list; she stares at Bellamy. He stares back.

Octavia mumbles, "Whatever," and leaves. The hatch slams down the same moment Bellamy flips the chair he sat on. He paces a few times before settling and facing the wall with the names of the guards with guns. One of the name is Erin's, a _buddy_ of Murphy's.

Clarke watches his back expand because he loves his sister too much to let it all out so he sucks it in, instead. She stands and eases the hatchet away from his stiff hands. He complies, but doesn't turn around. Clarke grips the hatchet. It's cold and deadly. It embodies everything he and she strive to be here on Earth. (But neither of them are cold. They feel too much. Passion and drive is all they have to get them through the nightmares and up the next morning.)

"Quinn was arrested for raping a girl." His voice rasps like a handsaw through wood. "And she think he's just a _flirt_."

She presses her hand into the space between his shoulder blades. His heart beats travel to her finger tips. So much power. "She wouldn't be the first girl to read a guy wrong." She feels his shuddering breaths and smells the stench of too many days without a bath. Chemically, sweat and tears are composed of different molecules, but their production can be due to the same stimulant. Clarke closes her eyes and sees Charlotte standing at the cliff's edge. _She only wanted to hold my hand._

* * *

**Author:** Just to clarify, the event that have happened in "Unity Day" have not occurred. I have my own plans for grounder interaction.  
Yes, this is Bellarke, but more of a slow burn. (But that's how we all like it, isn't it?)  
Thank you for reading. I would love to know what you think!


	2. Chapter Two

**Edited: **10/2015

* * *

**The Person (I should have been)  
Chapter Two**

"Maybe there is a beast...maybe it's only us."  
William Golding, _Lord of the Flies_

* * *

Bellamy jogs through the forest with dawn breaching the trees. He skips over roots and rocks and the anxieties of camp. Each exhale sounds like the name of a dead teenager. (_Owen. Fenton. Tina. Pascal. Atom. Wells. Charlotte. John. Deeks. Roma. Dax. Thomas. Jose._) He breathes in the living's names on pine tinged air. (_Philip. Miller. Monroe. Finn. Jasper. Monty. Evy. Tristan. Ron. Raven. Nori._) If he trips, he curses _Murphy_. Every flutter of songbird wings he thinks _Octavia_. And when he pauses to sip water, he watches a hawk pluck at its prey gripped between her claws. Her feathers puff around her to insulate her body against the morning chill.

Bellamy's pants are wet from the dew. If he doesn't continue moving, he will get cold. He can't look away from the raptor until she fans out her wings and swoops into the rising sun to find a more private place to enjoy her meal, her belly white and spotted. When he's running, the hawk's shrill call breaks the sleepy coos of morning doves. He stops. In that ten seconds, everything is _Clarke._

The deer trail breaks into a cut of younger trees, spaced out from each other and with plenty of smaller bushes and grass. The turkeys strut through the low brush, picking at the ground for protein filled bugs. When he first found them a week ago, he thought about killing them, but then he crushed a batch of eggs under his boots and realized capture was more sustainable.

When Clarke and he talked about camp matters, he weaved ruined cloth together to create a net. She hated it when he didn't look at her when talking, so he wasn't surprised when she snapped to know what was more important than making building plans to replace the tents.

He smiled and said, "Now, you wouldn't want to ruin the surprise, would you, princess?"

Clarke huffed and left to collect the few engineers to present them her sketches.

The tom, the male, is spectacular with his ruffled breast and red-blue mask of wrinkled skin. The five females blend into the moist ground. Bellamy spirals closer. After coming out to this space everyday to familiarize himself with the landscape and habits of the turkeys, he anticipates the haul back to camp, grinning.

He rustles bushes and throws rocks to herd the birds into a smaller group. They cluck and the tom's feathers flare and breast puffs. He tracks the movements of his flock. Bellamy steers the animals south where he found a house foundation. It would become his trap. Pulling on the net, he readjusts his grip. The edges are weighed down, but it doesn't guarantee it will fan out. He creeps towards the birds. _One shot_. When the male looks up, its black eye locks on his. Bellamy moves.

* * *

"Can you talk to her?" Clarke asks. "You're the only on who knows what it's like to raise a baby."

They stand shoulder to shoulder, looking down at the collection of people cooing over the turkeys. Bellamy was only able to capture two females. With each about a ten pound live load that squawked and fussed the whole way, plus the tom weighing in at least ten pounds heavier than then ladies, he wouldn't have made it back with any more.

Until a more sturdy pen could be constructed, the turkeys are being kept tied down under the net. Clarke already saw to the scratches on his leg when the tom charged. It wasn't deep, but he would need to stitch his pants. After eating his dinner of roasted turkey, it won't take long.

"What? Can't you appreciate your surprise for a little?" he says, gesturing to the clucking hens.

Clarke grins, half of her face lifting more than the other. It's her amused-smile. Not her happy smile. She teases, "Yes, thank you, oh warrior-Bellamy."

"It was my honor, brave-princess." They share a laugh. Despite the cold morning, with the sun at its zenith it's hot. Everyone stashes their jackets and walks about in t-shirts stained with sweat and dirt. Octavia slips forwards in the crowd until she toes the edge of the net. She tosses something at the animals. They tilt their heads left and right and left again before pecking at the ground. The crowd shifts as people get bored and leave or try to get a better view of the bulky birds. Not everyone is as enchanted with the forest as he is. For many, this might be their first up-close encounter with a live animal. He names as many faces as he can. (_Miller. Sean. Don. Rachel. Philip._)

Clarke says what he's thinking as he scans the crowd, "Who raped Donna? Who else should we be concerned about?" She shakes he head and turns her back away. "How well do we really know these people?"

"This is our new start," he defends, chin lifting. "I don't care about crimes on the Ark. I only care about their actions down here." He watches Clarke from the corner of his eyes.

She scoffs, "I know," and doesn't protest anymore. Standing in the sun works out the strain in his back from carrying the turkeys. Although the camp is dark with brown and black and steel, it's bright with the remnants of summer heat and sunlight.

Bellamy crosses his arms and looks back at her. Her blond hair is knotted and her lips are chapped. He sniffs the air between them. "Why does your breath smell like moonshine?"

Her eyes flick away, and she shuffles her feet. She does that when embarrassed. "I used it to rinse my mouth. Make it feel less…fuzzy."

"Oh, right. Next time I see Sheppard sneaking off with the moonshine from the med bay, I'll be sure to consider _that's_ what he's doing."

She snorts and swipes away sweat on her forehead. "None of us know what to use to keep our teeth clean. Monty's guesses are only to get us so far."

"There's a lot of things we don't know," Bellamy clarifies. "But that doesn't mean we're going to stop trying to figure this shit out."

She taps her foot. "How many are going to die before we get it right?" Her eyes are blue and bright like the glint of the Ark when light hits the metal casing. Bellamy doesn't look away until she does.

He shouts for people to get moving, that a turkey needs plucked, houses built, and a wall guarded. Some listen; some don't. Bellamy repeats their names to himself: _Xavier. Fran. Trevor._

"Bellamy, will you talk with Donna?" Clarke continues, stepping into his line of vision.

He thinks of the harsh, white lights of the Ark and how he couldn't wash Octavia for two days after she was born because Thursdays, not Tuesdays, is when they had 20 minutes of water use. "You want me to convince her out of it? Tell her having a baby is a bad idea?" He's not really sure if he's asking her or not.

"I want to give her all the information I can. That's what I want to do." Bellamy looks away first this time.

He waves over Nori, a chubby guy with an easy smile and a wheezing laugh. He's their most educated architectural engineer. Bellamy reassigns him to lashing together a cage before going back to construction on alternative housing. Clarke thanks Nori. When he smiles, the white of his teeth is startling against his dark skin. (Bellamy isn't sure why he was arrested. It's that lack of knowledge that makes him doubt his stated conviction that he _doesn't care about crimes on the Ark_.)

"Is she going to be okay talking to me?" Bellamy says once Nori jogs off, holding up his loose pants.

"I'll ask and see what she's comfortable with. We do this on her terms, but we do it together remember?"

He smirks, tasting the moonshine on her breathe again. "What are you waiting for then, princess?"

* * *

Jasper meets them halfway to Donna's tent. His goggles swing form his neck and his eyes are so bloodshot Bellamy thinks he's high. He's gasping out things Bellamy can't imagine to be actual words, but Clarke understands the half-formed sentences and the desperate twitch of his arm. She runs to Donna's tent, and Bellamy does too because if she's running that's all the reason he needs. The light in the tent is orange and disorienting. He reaches to lead Clarke out. Donna's just sleeping, her back to them, and Jasper is obviously high and they have other things to work on. His finger tips brush the stiff material of her jacket. She crouches by Donna and pulls her shoulder back. But the body is too stiff and there's no groaning as the teenager is roused form her nap. (_I won't be able to talk with her. Never._ He knows this even before Clarke shakes her head after trying to find a pulse.)

Bellamy wonders over the purple bruises along her neck and collar bone for ten seconds. Allows himself a moment of shock that another human being did this. When Donna's ripped shirt falls open, he focuses on the back of Clarke's head. Then, he smells the blood. It's like when he killed Dax: no semblance of power or strength. Just unstable feet and lapse of rational thought. Because there was once life and now there is not.

Clarke pulls a blankets over the body. _Donna's body, _he reminds himself. He needs to. She was once alive, and he was about to give her parenting advice. He was going to tell her about how babies only sleep for two to three hours at a time those first few weeks and they're _always_ hungry. He wanted to tell her about the crying he still has nightmares about because even if you're right next to them, your heart still races like you ran to their side. Then he would talk about the smile and the smell and the first time Octavia got sick—

"Bellamy, do you trust Monroe?" she asks.

He's nodding and says, "Yeah."

"I could use her help."

"What? Why?" The blanket slips and the bruises are there again. _Do they get darker the longer someone's dead?_

"I need to get her ready for the pyre and I don't think…I don't think she would want a man handling her."

"Okay," he says. He runs a hand through this hair, grease slick between his fingers. "Okay."

When Bellamy leaves, he slams into Jasper. The boy grapples with the lapels on his jacket, every hallow of his face full of panic. "Was it a grounder?" he asks.

"No." Bellamy says. And it isn't until he sees the colors of trees and hears the crackle of fires that he grasps the truth. "No, it wasn't a grounder."

He starts to walk away, but turns back. Jasper's back is curved forward, and he stares into the shadows of the tent, mouth open. "Start collecting the wood, will you? Get a lot of people to help, my orders. Don't say anything aside that it's for a pyre, got it?" He repeats it because Jasper doesn't understand the first time around. Jogging away, Bellamy's face sharpens as he calculates the reaction of the 100. If he's not careful—well, history has a tendency to repeat itself. _Murphy and Charlotte and Wells._ He breathes in their names.

He finds Monroe working on the wall, her muscles clenching as she hefts up a tree limb so a thin boy can wedge it into place. He stops her before she can pick up another one. "Clarke needs your help."

Maybe it's the way he doesn't look her in the eyes or how he says Clarke's name, but she grabs her jacket and spear and follows him in silence. People still laugh and smile as they make their way back towards Donna's tent on the east side of camp. Bellamy unconsciously looks for Octavia. He wants to see how the scabs on her face are healing. He wants to see the sarcastic twitch of her eyebrow. He wants to argue with her just to know she has air in her lungs and is alive. He could stop. He could leave Monroe and Clarke and Donna's body to find Octavia, but he doesn't because it's not her that needs him now.

* * *

No-one noticed the graves were disturbed until the first leaves began to change. They thought it was wild animals digging up the bodies, trying to get the meat. That's why they started building pyres instead of digging graves. As fire blackens Donna's body, a fouler reason comes to Bellamy's mind: grave robbers. _All the bodies buried were fully clothed and had good boots_. He covers his mouth with his sleeve. Even though everyone gathered stands down wind, the smell still causes a few to gag. Neither Clarke or he said anything. They left the others do that for them. _Let them stew. Let them get nervous,_ he thinks, glancing through the crowd. _Let the cold truth that one of our own did this, _again_, settle in._ The blade of his hatchet is dull, but it can still kill. He traces the edge of it with his finger as whispers wash over him like the heat of the pyre.

"What happened?"

"How'd she die?"

"Shit, did you see all the bruises on her?"

"Why hasn't Bellamy and Clarke said anything?"

"Grounders?"

"Jasper said it wasn't them."

"So who killed her then if it wasn't the grounders?"

The fire's glow matches the color of the fading sun and he feels hot, hot, hot all over. He grips his hatchet, knowing the weight and balance like he knows the movement of Octavia's hair. _Come on,_ he thinks. _We know you're here and we will find you and we will ki—_and then he hears it. The humming. The song of Atom's death. The song of Clark's mercy and strength and comfort and love. He reaches for something to steady him, to remind him this is here and now. It's Miller's shoulder that gives Bellamy a reason to speak, to cut through the humming and break it into insignificant sounds like the crackling of pine needles as they burn.

"Assign Richard to watch over the pyre, will ya? I don't want the wind catching it and burning us all with it," he commands. Stepping back and away. Distancing himself. Covering up his weakness with strength and twilight's shadows.

"I'll do it."

Bellamy frowns. He didn't notice the tears before. He sees them now. "Was she…something to you?" he asks. He needs to show support, to be there for the few people he trusts. He has to make sure he can give them reasons to follow him, to listen to him.

Miller snorts down the snot and tears. He spits it all on the ground. "Yeah. Neighbors on the Ark. God, she sucked at Earth skills. All of it." He chuckles, but it catches and the tears are forcing their way back up. "But people have a way of working themselves into you and you find that you don't wanna let them go." Bellamy doesn't say anything; Miller isn't speaking for his benefit. This is Donna's eulogy. "Soon we were stupid kids in love and doing stupid shit. Ya know, she got arrested on purpose? God, it took three days and then I see her getting dragged in to confinement by guards. Said she didn't want to be anywhere that I wasn't." Bellamy flinches when Miller grabs onto his jacket, pulling at the sleeve. "It was supposed to be different here, man, _different_. I was gunna make her happy, and she was gunna make me happy, dammit. I don't know, she just stopped. I didn't realize it until after Murphy. Maureen said she was fine, though, that nothing happened. That is must have been me. W-why? What did I do?" And he starts crying like he's screaming.

Once Bellamy is away from the fire, from Charlotte's empty grave, and getting ready to go to bed does the humming come back to him. Not because he hears it, but because he remembers the brush of Clarke's hand as she takes the knife away from him and how she combed back Atom's hair before sliding metal into blistering skin. As he moves between shadows of tents, he tugs his zipper up. Leaves shuffle as the wind picks up, moving together like one dark mass rising up to swallow him. He kicks it down and marches on.

The translucent tarp covering the entrance of the drop ship looms ahead. Inside the steel gleams from the yellow light bulbs and someone is talking in a low voice to their parent on the radio, static interrupting their conversation. Clarke leans over her table, for it is _hers_. She has saved lives and lost lives on it. (She will save lives and lose lives on it, too.) She'll eat her meals as she sees patients on it, pecking a food between cuts and burns. She organizes supplies here, sorting out a few leaves careless hands let slip through during the initial look through by gatherers. And she sleeps here, in case someone needs to find her. Bellamy tease her it's because she's too lazy to get to a tent (but he knows it's because at the end of the day, she's ready to fall asleep on her feet and the idea of walking any father than necessary seems ridiculous).

She's standing, sketching a few things out from the journal they confiscated from the grounder. Her hair matches the color of the light and her shoulders slope down. She told him she recognizes the sound of his footsteps now, so he waits for her to acknowledge him.

"What, Bellamy?" she sighs, not looking up. The pencil moves in short, fast strokes; the sound rises above the radio static and crickets. It reminds him of the sewing machine his mother used to own. The needle bobbed in and out off tattered fabric.

"You got a sec?" He signals with his head to outside.

She sets aside her work and follows him. She holds back until they're out of the circle of light overflowing from the drop ship to ask again what he wants. Her hands are in her pockets, she yawns, and shivers. She mumbles something about winter. Bellamy sees the light of the pyre beyond the fence. It glows and points out the gaps in the wall. So many gaps.

"Clarke." He swallows, but he can't keep the words down. He has to ask. (Atom and the humming. Atom and the begging. Atom and the killing.) "Clarke, did you do it? Did you kill Donna?" Her eyes are wide and he swears he can see the summer sky. He doesn't see the punch coming because she doesn't move her hips. ("That's where all the power comes from," his drill sergeant said in cadet training.)

"You _fucking_ asshole." He can't see her with his head snapped to the side, jaw throbbing.

She's gone when he looks back. Only clouds of his breath fill the space where she stood. He doesn't go after her. He joins Miller. Donna's bones are still visible among the ashes.

* * *

**Author: **Thank you for your reviews and follows and favorites. Each one filled my e-mail and my heart.  
This chapter broke my heart to write, for many reasons, but I hope, despite the pain, you'll find love in it. (Or at least hope for love because there will be another chapter.) I'll be working with the concept of Unity Day and grounder instead in the next chapter, follow by some other events...


	3. Chapter Three

**Edited_: _**10/2015

* * *

**The Person (I should have been)  
Chapter Three**

"It's hard to wake from a nightmare when the nightmare is real."  
Kristin Cashore, _Fire_

* * *

Octavia and Bellamy yell at each other in front of the 100, like an old drama replaying on the Ark. The morning sun spotlights their argument. Clarke stands with the rest of the crowd, positioning herself so she can watch as Octavia's nose wrinkles and her lips rise, barring her teeth. Everyone thinks she doesn't listen to Bellamy because they are siblings. She turns her nose up at his authority and walks into the forest when she wants because that's what brothers and sisters do, right? Clarke feels the press of the journal in the back pocket of her pants and knows what lengths people will go to for the ones they love. Bellamy knows this, too. Maybe it's not the grounder that scares him, but the love Octavia shows for the enemy. It terrifies him so much he's willing to humiliate himself before of the 100.

"Who are you to question me, Bellamy? You think you're so great and so immune—"

"I'm your brother dammit! Why can't you just let me do my job?"

"Because I'm not a job," she spits and shoves him.

The muscles on the back of his neck coil, but Bellamy absorbs his sister's curses and hate. Clarke knows because of how his back slouches like he's taking a hit to the gut and trying to minimize the blow. She wonders if it works. She hears whispers of betting behind her. It's Ulric and Lucus with their matted hair and guns cradled in their arms.

Lucus grins at her when she looks back and sneers, "You wanna add to the pot, princess?" He's chewing something that turns his teeth red.

Looking at Ulric reminds Clarke of seeing a grounder with their face masks. She keeps her eyes on his finger hovering above the trigger.

"You like to gamble, don't you?" Lucus gestures at her with his weapon. Clarke moves her body away from the barrel, not about to trust a 97 year old gun and the 16 year old gripping it. "You're the only one here who know how to patch us up. You get to bet on our lives. Everyday day. How 'bout we turn the tables and bet on your—Bellamy," Lucus greets, slouching as if to hide his threats in nonchalance.

She keeps her shoulders straight and feet grounded. In two days, she hasn't spoken nor seen his face. She's not about to break her record. But she doesn't have to see him to know he stands right behind her. The toe of his boot nudged against the back of her right foot; heat from his body easing her backache; a board resting on a wall.

"Don't you two have rounds to be doing." A command. Not a question.

Ulric nods and marches away. Lucus smiles—but maybe it's a snarl. He mocks a salute and saunters away. Maureen steps out of his path and from his reach. He revels in the submission she shows to him. Clarke watches as he moves out of sight, feet cracking on the frosted ground. Bellamy's pressure lessens, and she takes a step forward, making the same between them large and awkward. She keeps half-turned and never looking into his face, "When I asked Raven, she said Lucus was arrested for his work with Nigel. She oversaw—"

"I know who Nigel is."

She wonders if she can throw a better punch with her left hand than her right hand. She decides a conversation with the turkeys will be more productive and walks away.

"Ya, happy Unity Day to you too, princess," he yells, his voice as powerful as gunfire. Some of the 100 stop to watch, no more discrete in their ogling than they were earlier as brother and sister participated in their daily ritual of how-many-ways-to-say-I-hate-you. Finn comes out from Raven's tent and looks about. He starts to walk towards her. Raven stands at the entrance, a pair of pliers in his hands. Clarke decides having a conversation with Bellamy rather than Finn in front of the delinquents will be less damaging to her ego. She calls out to him.

He looks back, gun slung over shoulder and his ears, nose, and cheeks pink from the cold. (Last night he had a hat. This morning, a 14 year old by the name of Marshal is wearing it.) She shouldn't expect him to come to her, but she does. So they stand on their toes, waiting for the other to step forward—to be the first one to give. He fixed his pant leg with quick, wide stitches from when the male turkey charged him. She wonders if, like her, he's unraveling the sleeves of his shirt to make up for the lack of string. (It's the little things, she thinks. Like string and shoelaces and hair ties and contraceptives.)

"Clarke," Finn says.

Bellamy and she move towards each other, breaking at the same time, and neither look in the other's eyes; he, glaring Finn down, and she, acknowledging all the spectators. She crosses her arms, hiding her bruised knuckles that match his bruised jaw. They stand with a fire crackling between them. The heat burns her thighs.

"It wanted to let you know," she begins, "That I forgive you." His eyes slide over and away from her. She feels it like winter in the morning making her stiff and reluctant to move. "You're an ass, like always, but I forgive you because you were just looking out for your sister, for yourself, for us all. You were just doing what needed to be done."

His chin is tilted away and his nose hangs high in the air, but his eyes are on her. She stares back, sometimes drifting to the scars of Dax's attack, but never to the bruise she left. She cried the night he asked her if she killed Donna, screaming into a blanket on the third floor. No one heard her. No one knew.

Her jaw pops as she says, "What I did to Atom—he would have died as we brought him back to camp, or if he survived, he would of always be in pain with his nerve ending so badly damaged—it would have been cruel." (She's also saying it was a kindness, what she did, and he knows it so why bother saying it? She saw how he looked at her afterwards.) "Atom made a choice. I wanted Donna to make a choice, too, but whatever her decision—there was a viable chance there, too. We would have figured it out. With the rest of the Ark coming down. My mom. Donna would have had a good chance with my mom."

"She had a good chance with you." His face angles down. He's apologizing by not apologizing, just like her. The fire glows on his cheeks. She likes the shadow of his hair on his ears and neck.

Clarke nods. "I want to remind you that I will never give in, never stop trying, until there is no hope of survival."

His cheek twitches. "I don't know why I expected anything less, princess."

Only Finn watches the last of their exchange. The rest grew bored of their leaders docile conversation and moved on. Both smile and stand straighter, but don't allow the other to see as they walk away.

* * *

Although the weather stays gray most of the day, the 100 party. Mont's Unity Day juice slick on their lips, and Counselor Jaha's speech this afternoon nothing but a gleaming star in the sky amongst millions. Clarke sits in the drop ship, peeling away the worst of Miller's burnt skin. Octavia found him wrist deep in the coals of the smoke house's fires, digging for something. He sways as he sits in front of Clarke on her examining table, as drunk as any of the people around the campfires croaking out Semi-Charmed Life from some twentieth century band. Since they moved the radio outside for the Unity Day speech, the drop ship is an echoing tomb. If an acorn drops and rolls down the side, it's the rolling thunder of another hurricane. Octavia paces. Clarke grits her teeth and keeps her hands steady as she uses tweezers to pry chunks of charcoal from cracking skin.

'Why am I still here again?" she snaps, arms braced against her body. It's from impatience, not cold. The inside of her jacket has been reinforced with a layer of animal skin. Bellamy made sure. Clarke watched him stitch the squirrel hides. He promised her he caught them himself. That he wasn't taking from the camps collective supplies. She only nodded.

Clarke grabs a canister of moonshine and says, "Hold his other arm," before pouring the alcohol over the oozing skin. Octavia catches Miller's hand before he hits Clarke. She recalls the different type of reflexes and chalks up his reaction to that instead of the darker thought that maybe he actually wants to hit her. (Does he think I killed her, too? she thinks and remembers Lucus' jab and how his hands looked with dirt caked under and around his fingernails.)

"Octavia." She begins working on Miller's other hand. Less of its surface is charred because it's his dominant hand with thicker calluses. "I wanted to—"

"Don't you lecture me, too. I had a mom Clarke; I don't need another one."

Clarke's hand slips. She jabs too deep. Miller whimpers and starts crying, but she doesn't think it's from the pain of his physical wounds.

Octavia's hands rest on Miller forearm, squeezing to reassure him and whispers, "It's okay. We'll take care of you."

The seaweed smells like the river but looks and feels like raw meat. Something bitter lodges itself in Clarke's throat and she wraps his hands like mittens. Octavia takes over from there, leading the grief-drunk Miller to a padded corner of the drop ship. She guides him to lean against the wall. His hands rest on his chest. She readjusts his jacket and pants so they would keep him warm and draws a bright orange blanket up to his hands. His eyes are closed. He's snoring by the time she gets up from her crouch.

Her gaze is as intense as her brother's. "What?" she barks.

It's then Clarke realizes it was her that was staring. She doesn't try to cover it up or make excuses. "When Donna first came to me, I thought it would have been better if she went to you, instead."

"What are you talking about?"

Clarke sterilizes the tweezers with moonshine before placing them with her other tools in a tin container—one of the few things the Ark had the forethought to include. "You're good at knowing how to comfort people. I don't know how to do that."

"Yeah, okay, but why would Donna need to come to you? Was she sick? Is that why she's dead?" Octavia presses. They look at each other across a floor covered in crushed leaves and pebbles. Octavia's face smooths into flat cheeks, straight lips, bland eyes. "Never mind, I don't freaking care."

"Could you?" Clarke holds up the medical kit and gesture towards the shelving with bundles of drying herbs, roots, seaweed, and torn cloth. Octavia steps forward, hesitates, and then snatches up the kit to shove it with the rest of the medical supplies behind her.

"Oh, and there's a book I think you might like under the Queen Anne's Lace. Bellamy said you were into history." Clarke wipes her hands on her pants and goes back to fiddling with her dinner. A cup of Unity Day Juice is full on the exam table. Sterling made her take it with her after their drinking game got interrupted. It smells too much like Wells when they were trapped in the abandoned bus with the acid storm above, and it tastes too much like Finn's lips when they first kissed in the bunker. She pushes it to the side, knowing it will make a good sterilizer.

She keeps her back turned from Octavia, reaching out for the log she's written on each of the hundred. It's an expansion of the original census collected along with any outstanding injuries that occurred while on earth, time of death, or the like. (A separate compilation of committed crimes hides under the panther rug on the third level.) Her mother keeps rigorous digital files of every resident on the Ark. While as her daughter, Clarke can't stand her mother, she can respect the professional manner of Dr. Abby and adopt some of her applicable practices. Clarke scribbles notes on Miller's condition, sighs, and turns around. Octavia is gone and so is the grounder's journal. The singing of Friday nights and dancing on table tops floods into the drop ship. Clarke stands in front of the plastic tarp, separating her from them, and doesn't move. The flickering of firelight wavers across her face.

Going through the grounder's drawings was like torturing him all over again. But like the torture, this needed to be done, too. Clarke copied only pertinent information and avoided lingering too long on the portraits of Octavia. Drawing taxed her. It never did before. Even when enclosed by four walls for months with little social contact. She chalks it up to a sore back and going to sleep wonder is she'll even want to wake up the next day. (Earth demands everything from her and so she gives it everything. But how soon will she have nothing left to give?)

* * *

She doesn't sleep that night because for as many enthralled, horny, drunk teenagers there are romping around, there are those curled in tight balls, begging for mommy. The first weeper comes in around one according to her dad's watch. The girl, Vanessa, clings to Clarke's shirt, stretching the fabric as she pulls them both to the ground. Before Clarke can even figure out how to comfort the tall, black girl—she's asleep, snoring. Clarke is grateful.

The next weeper is Monty. His black hair and black eyes keep asking questions that she doesn't have the answers to. As she hugs him, awkward and unsure of where she should put her hands, he whispers, "Jasper has always been there. What if he's not one day?"

She distracts herself from that narrow and dark though process of "what ifs" by running through the different materials on the medical shelves. He doesn't fall asleep as easily as Vanessa. Nori is next except he alternates between terrifying laughter that is too sharp for a place made of metal. When he starts crying, Clarke wishes he would go back to laughing. But she's no Octavia, so she does what she can by giving him a little food from her dinner to help settle his stomach and hopes he doesn't throw it back up.

Bellamy shoves Quinn in as she's trying to bring Monty down from his hysterical ranting about needing to give the Earth a hug. ("Because, you know," he says. "Maybe she won't be angry at us anymore.") Clarke takes stock of Quinn's busted lip and the way Bellamy doesn't let go of his shoulder, fingers digging into his coat.

"What did he do?" She says over Monty's murmuring.

"Oh, you know, flirting." Bellamy's smile shows too many teeth.

Monty's hugging her now, telling her everything will be alright. "Can you tie him up or something?"

"Him or me?" Quinn smiles. Bellamy shoves him against the drop ship ladder and uses seat belts to bind together his hands high on the ladder rungs so he will have to stay standing, even when sleeping.

"Does that answer your question?" Clarke grumbles, not knowing how to disengage from Monty's hug.

Bellamy sighs and says, "I guess I'll just have to do everything around here." He gets Monty to lay down, curled under the operation table. She almost wishes he used some special trick to calm the chemist down, but it appears as if it only takes soft words and smiles.

Clarke readjusts her stretched out shirt as they sit, side by side, on a cot, both focused on the tarp covering the entrance of the drop ship.

"You gave Octavia the grounder's notebook." He checks the safety on the gun before lowering it to the ground, freeing his hands. They're clean.

She picks at the dirt under her nails. She doesn't want to be like Lucus. "Yes."

"How's Miller?" He glances at his second-in-command.

"The burns won't be a problem." A wind kicks up the tarp, the ends of it snapping in the air until the gust dies down again. "They're relatively superficial. Octavia got to him fast enough. I'm worried he might check-out, though."

"He needs to grieve," Bellamy defends, shifting away from Clarke. She wishes he wouldn't. She doesn't want to be alone again.

He changes the subject, "And Vanessa?"

"She's fine. She'll probably deny any of this happening in the morning." She begins cleaning the other hand, but get sidetracked as Bellamy runs his thumb over his lips, thinking. "In a twisted way, I got lucky." She doesn't try to fill the silence; he's talking to her because who else can they go to? "Vanessa's not pregnant because the birth control from the Ark hadn't worn out when we had sex. Roma's dead. And Vik turns out to be infertile." He scoffs. "Hell, we've been all been riding on luck this whole time, haven't we princess?"

Clarke thinks about how soft the blankets were in the bunker where Finn and she had sex. Cool sheets that were probably never used now forever stained. The candles filled the safe house made even the shadows soothing whispers. Nothing like the penetrating blue light of the Ark. She whispers, "I almost told Octavia about Donna's baby." She watches Miller breathe. "She stood there with questions, but her hate from the interrogation stopped her from asking." She admits, "If she asked, I know I would have told her."

"Lucky, huh?" She smiles at Bellamy. He's close to her again. She takes her time going over the bruise along his jaw. Her knuckles will take longer to heal. "We can't rely on luck anymore." Clarke sighs.

"We can't afford to," he finishes for her.

She thinks about Donna's body as she prepared it for the pyre. It was automatic for her to account for the damage, to note lacerations, and look for a cause of death. Monroe said she was a cold-hearted bitch for talking like that with the body still warm. Clarke bows her head into her hands; they're not clean. It will take more than just picking at fingernails.

"What are we doing?" The black leather on her boots has worn into gray. She wiggles her toes and feels a hole in her socks.

"What we can," he answers.

"Will that be enough?"

His knee touches hers and says, "It has to be."

* * *

Finn finds them like that, both staring at the floor with drunken snores and sobs echoing in the drop ship. His hands twitch, and he keeps shifting from side to side. It must be three in the morning.

"What is it?" Clarke says.

Bellamy stands, gun in his hands. Finn chews on his cheek. Like Bellamy, he has tells as to when he's thinking. "My stitches have been itchy. Do you might giving them a look over?"

"What? You're coming to her with this, now?" Bellamy sneers.

But he doesn't know that Finn's the type of person who looks you straight in the eye as he lies. Clarke does. "Yeah, I'll check them out," she says and moves towards the medical shelves, avoiding Monty's legs poking out from beneath the surgical table. She gestures him forward to where there is better light. She lifts Finn's shirt and dabs a rag logged with alcohol along the stitches. His breathe hitches with each draw of the cloth along his wound. Some fluid leaks between the sutures. Normal, she thinks. No increased swelling. She prods around, feeling for hardness. Normal. She traces some of the more tender looking areas. He's being too active…but doing what? She glances at Bellamy. His eyebrows scrunched together. He notices something is off about Finn, too.

She clears her throat and drops his shirt. "It looks good, but don't cover it with anything. It needs to continue to air out. Take it easy. The skin is fragile and if you keep pulling at it you'll cause more damage."

Finn's not listening. He stares at a dozing Quinn and asks, "Why is he tied up?"

Bellamy answers, "Just a precaution." He maneuvers between Finn and Quinn. "Keeping the peace and all that. Some people don't get to sleep."

"And all that," Finn mocks. "How can you let him do that, Clarke?" His eyes dart to her cheeks, forehead, ears. It's like he's trying to read her like he reads the forest floor when tracking animals.

"I asked him to, Finn," she says. She places one hand on her hip and takes a sip of her forlorn moonshine. With the way the night's progressing, the alcohol won't be saved for disinfectant.

"Without probable reason? Just on some whim—"

"You don't know that." (She wants to add, You know nothing. But she won't waste effort on him when he doesn't try to understand because he doesn't want to understand.) "Besides, you know I wouldn't do something like that," she says.

"Do I?"

She hates how he asks her that. How it makes her doubt the sound decisions she's made. Everything she's done is minimized and dismissed when he angles his body away form her, shakes his head, and leaves. Clarke listens to Monty's sleep talk about fission reactors until the sun rises. Bellamy doesn't leave the drop ship until she agrees to hole herself up on the third floor, empty cases of ammunition around her and the names of those who checked out guns this shift: Ulric. Del. Monroe. Philip. Black on gray, the names perch on the wall like crows preparing for flight.

* * *

**Author: **Thank you, readers, for all the love you've shown me through reviews and favorites and fallows. (I hope this chapter cleared up any confusion as to why Bellamy might have considered Clarke to be Donna's killer, too.) I hope you enjoyed my interpretation of Unity Day. For those of you who are wondering where all the grounders are in this...don't worry. ;)


	4. Chapter Four

**A note: **The episode 'Unity Day' spans two days. Chapter Three covered day one; Chapter Four will cover the events of day two...with a different sort of flare of course.

* * *

**The Person (I could have been)  
Chapter Four**

"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact."  
Arthur Conan Doyle, _The Boscombe Valley Mystery_

* * *

He is trying to teach Fenton, a sixteen year old who was involved in the illegal fighting ring on the Ark, how to skin a rabbit. Bellamy brings the knife down the stomach and then traces tricky areas, feeling the pull of ligaments and tendons as he separates skin from muscle. "You don't want to pierce deeper than this," he instructs. "It gets messy fast if you do."

Fenton nods, but his round face is pale and sweating in the mid-morning humidity. "What if, ya know, they're not dead?"

He's looking at the boy the whole time as he separates meat from skin and says, "They're always dead."

Bellamy side-steps before Fenton throws up. He sighs and waits for the gagging to end. Stopping the apologies before they get too far, he says, "Go to Clarke. She'll get you something to help calm your stomach."

He kicks leaves and dirt over the spot where Fenton's regurgitated breakfast lays. The wind shifts and camp smoke drifts over the few cleaning and checking the animals for diseases over a bloody table. It was salvaged from a personal bunker Clarke found with Raven when they needed parts for the radio. The pale pine top is now stained and blotchy. The table was meant for quiet meals of canned beans and hours spend coloring, but it has been repurposed by the hundred, like the other items: mattresses from the beds cover areas of the med bay; boxes of candles distributed through camp; the couch ending up in a different tent every few days as the one hundred smuggle it out from each others tents. Even the cement filled haven is a mausoleum of family photographs and trash, never to be inhabited.

Ulric guts the skinned rabbit as Bellamy starts on another one, his fingers guiding him more than his eyes. Hunters came back with two deers, nineteen rabbits, and too many squirrels to be worth the trouble of skinning so they roast directly over the fires.

"What?" Ulric glances up at the guard-made-janitor-made-leader. (Those titles are all lies, and Bellamy knows it)

If one thing is for sure, Bellamy doesn't do covert asks what he was thinking: "What got you put away?"

"I killed a woman, my mom, if ya really wanna know." Ulric separates the rabbit's liver from the rest of the gleaming innards and puts it into a pile with the rest of the edible meat that will be charred over the fire.

Bellamy doesn't see Ulric's square face and blond-dreadlocked hair for a moment, but the sweaty face of Aurora after she gave birth to Octavia. "Why?" The question is a reflex, like reaching out for Octavia every time he hears gun fire.

"Cause she raped me." Bellamy stops mid-tear, one half of the rabbit brown and fuzzy and the other half macabre and dripping. Ulric frowns. "You're going to ruin the fur," he says and finishes scraping out the inside of the rib cage. Then, he continues by saying, "You might have shot Jaha, but you don't know shit about taking revenge, do you?"

Bellamy swallows before taking the knife to the rabbit's skin and shaving off the rest. Ulric was right, he ruined the fur, but the skin might be salvaged for other uses. "How old were you?" The back-and-forth motion of the knife hides the shaking of his hands.

Ulric sighs, the type of sigh someone gives when looking up at the sky to try to figure out if it will rain or not today. "Guess ten or something."

Bellamy grunts; his knife catches on a ligament in the throat.

"Jeez, let me do the rest." Ulric reaches over the table to take the limp rabbit away, his hands black and red and steady.

"You're right," Bellamy answers, handing away the botched animal. "But is what you did to your mom revenge or survival?"

One of Ulric's eyebrows dips down while the other curves up. "One in the same, aren't they? Just depends if you lie to yourself before you go to bed or not."

"But which one's the lie?" Bellamy grins like they're talking about which girl out of the one hundred that has the finest ass.

Ulric chuckles without smiling and replies, "Yeah, that's a damn good question."

Rapping his knuckles against the table, Bellamy thanks Ulric before turning towards the drop ship with every intention of updating the crumpled list hiding beneath panther fur on the third level. It will not happen.

* * *

Monroe stands at the top of the ladder, her legs spread and a club tight in her hands. Bellamy eyes her weapon and asks, "What going on?"

She doesn't say anything until the hatch is closed and locked. "We're missing eleven guns."

He grits his teeth. He remembers that he is a leader and asks about the ammunition.

"Only the duds are missing." Clarke sits on top of the plastic chests containing what few rounds they have. Her eyes are closed and the dull lights do nothing to soothe the pallor of her skin. "Good thing we kept the good stuff under lock and key, huh?"

They both know that is not true. The crates have a lock, but the mechanisms are so rusted that it does not do anything. Bellamy tries to think about the people who do not know that, but then focuses on the people who _do_ know that because the list is much shorter. "Some one snuck into Raven tent and stole bullets?" he says. He shifts back on his heels, pissed but begrudgingly impressed. "That guy's got some balls on him, that is for sure."

"Or she trusts them," Monroe points out, the blunted edge of her club dragging on the floor. Her ears seem larger with her head shaved. (When Bellamy asked her why she did it, she said, "Roma braided my hair. No point to having it long if she's not here.")

"Or she's the one that stole them," Clarke says, but holds up a hand to signal to Bellamy she's not done. "Just saying what needs to be said. If we're going to be hunting someone out, gotta make sure it's the right person this time. We have to acknowledge all the scenarios."

"Well, why can't it be her?" Monroe presses. "She's doesn't really belong here. Came here just for her boyfriend, right? She might be trying to get amnesty with the grounders by trading our weapons to them." The air moves only when they breathe. It tastes like it did in the janitors' closets of the Ark: damp rags and empty chemical bottles. Bellamy wants to leave, but crouches and puts one hand down like he is a lineman in a three-point stance in the American football games.

"Raven wouldn't give the grounders just duds. She's smart, remember? Rocket scientist. She'd mix the duds and the working one's together so that she could appease the grounders, but still stay under the radar here at camp," Clarke defends. "It's someone who doesn't know the difference between good and bad gun powder."

Bellamy considers pulling out the list to see if anyone crimes might line up to the recent threats. When he glances at Clarke, she shakes her head. He is not sure if the gesture was meant to mean something else, but he takes the signal and refrains from bringing it out. After all, they would have to explain to Monroe the truth behind Donna's murder and how they have been keeping tabs on the one hundred. The panther fur prickles his fingers as he rubs the rug the wrong direction. No. No one but Clarke and he can know about the list.

He focuses on what they have speculated so far about their thief. "If we go off of the idea that it's someone she trusts, but an idiot when it comes to chemistry…" Bellamy begins.

"Not Monty and Jasper, then," Clarke says, her head nodding and fingers laced together over her knees. "Miller's in the clear, too."

Bellamy looks at her, asking, "Since when does Miller know chemistry?"

Her amused-but-not-happy smile lifts her cheeks up. "That's not what I mean. He's off the list for other reasons."

"Ah." His chin tilts up in acknowledgment. "How's he doing today? He wasn't in the med-bay when I came up."

Monroe answers instead of Clarke. "He seemed better. Less—" She makes circular motion with one of her fingers pointed at her temple, "Loco, ya know. Doing shit around camp, at least."

Clarke shrugs at the description and says he just needs time. Bellamy wants to remind her that they don't _have _time. (Something that hasn't changed between living on the Ark and living on Earth.)

"Besides, he's one of us. Like you two." Monroe yawns and picks at a bug bite on her wrist. Clarke tells her to stop. Monroe doesn't and continues with her line of thought, "So, I guess were looking for someone who isn't one of us and sucks at—"

"What do you mean 'one of us'?" Bellamy interrupts. He pinches the bridge of his nose, massaging the muscles like Clarke told him to do if he feels a headache coming on.

Monroe sharp features slacken. She flounders for a description. "Well, you know. Making a life here. Standing our ground. Not being intimidated by a bunch of freaks in masks."

A sharp intake of breath has him looking up at Clarke as her face settles into the same resigned, tired look of betrayal. Last night, she wore the same mask. Last night…Bellamy says "Finn" the same time she does. She nods and lowers her eyes so that she is looking up at him through her lashes and adds, "And Octavia."

_Maybe this is how she felt when I accused her of killing Donna,_ he thinks the same time he growls, "No." But he really means _yes_ because Octavia would steal guns and bullets to try to make peace.

"Well, ain't that a bitch," Monroe says. "Your own sister."

"Thanks for bringing it to my attention," he sneers, standing up. Between his fingers is blood he missed when washing up from cleaning the rabbit.

Clarke knees pop as she rises too. "So what do we do then? Set a trap to catch them in the act to make sure it's really them?"

"Nah." He smiles down at her, portraying arrogance with the way he keeps his hands on his hips and head tilted back. She frowns in response. She knows him too well and the display does not confuse her the same way it does Monroe who blurts, "What the hell do you mean?"

"We're just gonna ask." Like he said, he doesn't do covert.

* * *

They come back at the same time, appearing from opposite sides of the camp. Finn walks through the gate. Octavia slips between the many gaps still in the wall. They make eye contact and reveal to Bellamy that where ever they were, they were together. When he approaches them from his seat next to a fire, they just began talking about something. They stand too close for it to be causal conversation, though, and Finn seems to eager by calling out a greeting. Bellamy asks them both to come to the drop ship, smiling as he does so. Finn just nods and says he will be there in a second. Octavia frowns and tell him he can't tell her what to do.

"Clarke's the one who suggested it, not me," he says, ignoring the bruise on the underside of her chin. He knows it is from pleasure not pain and that causes him to force his smile wider, fighting against the frown.

"Clarke asked for me?"

He shrugs his shoulders. He still has trouble lying to his sister.

She works her jaw back and forth. "Okay, let me get some food and I'll be right there."

He turns his back before he says anything he might regret (like: "You don't need food, that damn grounder makes sure of it" or "You mean you need to talk to Finn and coordinate a story to keep hiding your involvement"). Breathing in the air helps clear away the dirty words from his mouth and the memory of janitorial closets.

* * *

Bellamy stands outside of the drop ship to ward away anyone from entering. A few approach with minor medical injuries, and he tells them to come back later. Harper, a girl who tries to mimic Monroe and Roma's intricate braids, is the first one to ask what's going on. Bellamy replies that the drop ship just needs cleaned out. "Doctors orders," he adds and the gathering crowd disperses back towards roasting rabbits and half-made weapons. He worries about the day Clarke realizes how much power she holds over these delinquents. Over him. But for now, Octavia and Finn trail towards him. He does not grin this time. Pulling aside the parachute, he gestures them in. Octavia tries to make eye contact with him, but he stares at the hickey until she huffs and pushes past him.

Finn is not the first one to speak. Bellamy bet an hour of guard duty that he would be. "A guy like him gets a kick out of knowing everything," he said while they were rearranging things on the third floor. Clarke agreed, but bet a hour of wall maintenance instead.

Monroe said, "We all can't bet against him, so I guess I'm gunna go with Octavia to make the first move." Monroe smirks from her place against the wall. She just won two hours of free time.

"What's going on?" Octavia asks, arms crossed. She nudges the box at their feet. The checked ammo used to be in there. "What's up with this?"

"It's a gift," Clarke says, hands in the pockets of her jacket. She is enjoying this. Bellamy feels the pull of a smile on his own cheeks. Miller does not try to hide his amusement. His head tilts back and he watches Finn from under the shadow of his black beanie. (It was Clarke who suggested the Miller be in the know. Bellamy sees the wisdom of that.)

"Clarke, what's going on?" Finn does not look anywhere, but her face. His jaw remains slack and his forehead wrinkles.

"Well, we figured that it be easier—nicer—if the grounders got the guns all wrapped up instead of in pieces. They seem like the kind of people who appreciate a thoughtful gesture." Bellamy circles from behind the two thieves to stand next to Clarke. His posture mirrors his sister's.

"Bell, what the hell are you talking about? What's in there, a bomb or something?" Octavia steps back and out of the direct light to create deeper shadows along her neck. He is grateful that the hickey is obscured by the darkness. It makes talking to her easier when she at least appears to look like his sister instead of some stranger he is not sure how to act around.

"Nope. Just the guns. Like promised." He makes a show of gesturing to the weapons leaning next to Monroe. "Except for those four. Insurance, you know."

"So, what are we going to do? Just march through the woods until we find some grounders to hand the guns over to?" Finn says, ridicule and scorn heavy in his voice. Clarke's smile reminds Bellamy of how she looked when she approached him about finding Jasper those first days on Earth: daring him to say the wrong thing.

"Oh. But you and Octavia already know where to meet them. Same place you dropped off the other guns, right?" Her voice is high and sweet. Too sweet.

"Clarke, what are you—"

"Dude, they know," Octavia says, running a hand through her hair. "No point in looking dumb. Just as important to know when to stand up as it is to sit down isn't it?" She looks at her older brother.

Bellamy's smile slips a bit. "'The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter,'" he quotes.

Finn frowns. "What?"

"Winston Churchill." Clarke looks between the sibilings. Monroe yawns. Miller itches at the blisters beneath his bandages. For a few moments, only the shouting of outside can be heard. But they do not have time to try to pass secret messages or decode signals. Survival is ruined by miscommunication. Bellamy learned that the same time he realized Clarke and he really just want the same thing: to make things better here on Earth than they were on the Ark. _Time to get down to business_, he thinks, and gives his partner's arm a nudge with his elbow.

She takes the cue. "Look." Clarke closes her eyes and crosses her arms. "We know that you've been smuggling our guns, probably to the grounders in some attempt to create peace. So we're just here to expedite the process."

"What about ammo?" Finn asks, biting his lip. He must of went by Raven's tent to see if he could sneak some more bullets. Too bad the whole tent was cleared out and everything relocated to the second floor of the drop ship.

"What did you tell the grounders you'd give them?" Bellamy replies instead. Octavia opens the chest, peering in at the dark metal.

"It was agreed that if I got the guns to them, they would stay on their side of the river," Finn recites. He is still looking towards Clarke. She does not acknowledge him. Her body angles towards Bellamy.

"Then you'll give them what we promised. The guns," Millers says, stepping forward. "Nothing more, nothing less."

Octavia snorts. "You think they're stupid or something?"

Clarke shakes her head. "No. They'll take the deal because their _smart_." She glances over at Finn, but his back is turned and his hands are up in the air. "And why in the world would taking a bunch of gun without the ammo be smart?" he says.

"Because if they want peace, they'll see this is how they get it." Bellamy does not like how Finn keeps his back turned.

Snorting, spacewalker goes on to say, "Yeah, or they just come kill us all because we went back on our deal!"

"_Our_ deal?" Clarke snaps. "This is on you."

"Really, well you know what—"

Octavia tells Finn to _shut up_ and continues speaking in a calmer voice. "Ya, you're right."

Monroe relaxes back against the wall. "When's the next drop?" Bellamy asks.

"Tomorrow," his sister replies.

He nods and smiles. "Looks like tomorrow is when the real Unity day will happen, huh?"

"Looks like it," Clarke agrees.

* * *

Bellamy is not surprised when Miller reports later on that day on the argument Clarke and Finn are having. "Looks like it'll come to blow," he adds.

"No, it won't," Bellamy assures, but he must have not believed his own words because fifteen minutes later he gives his rabbit thigh away to Fenton (with a warning not to waste it by throwing up) and meanders through the tents and chatter towards the hushed insults of the couple. He mills between two smaller fires near the argument, trying to remain inconspicuous. Their voices do not rise about the hissing of wet wood, the swaying of tree branches, and the giggling of a couple in one of the tents. Only with the shifting of wind can Bellamy hear what Finn is saying to Clarke. However, words come in disjointed segments and without context. He watches their body movements rather than trying to discern what they saying. He can't see Finn's face because he stands with his back towards the rest of the camp. Clarke's mouth stays open, but Finn does not give her any time to form a reply before blundering on. Finn's hands reach out towards Clarke. She swipes them away and looks down at the space between them. Her mouth closes. The wind rises. Bellamy pulls at the collar of his jacket to bring it further up on his neck.

"Stop keeping secrets," he hears. Clarke walks away, shaking her head. Finn combs his hands through his hair a few times, steps to move in the same direction she did, but Bellamy stands in his way. Finn's eye blow wide in the dark with anger and surprise. Perhaps his looked the same way. He never intended to intervene. (_Liar_, he thinks. _Why else would you have come?_)

Finn tries to leave, but Bellamy shuffles to stay in front of him. "What do you want?" he snaps, neck tight with tension.

Bellamy smirks, enjoying having the upper hand over the ever calm and collected spacewalker. "Don't include my sister in any of your schemes," he says, resting a hand on the axe slung from his hip.

Fin scoffs and leans away, looking for Clarke in the clusters of people surrounding the camp fires. "She wants to make peace. Unlike you."

His voice remains flat and disinterested, however; he is bating Bellamy. He wants to fight, to yell, to shout, to undermine any authority Bellamy has over the one hundred.

"Peace," Bellamy repeats, working his jaw. "How idealistic." He does not give Finn time to respond. He steps right up to him, jackets brushing. Bellamy hates how clean he keeps himself, as if he is above their desperate attempt at survival. He wants to smudge that prick's face in dirt, make him skin the animals he tracks, and tear a few holes in his clothes. Bellamy settles for growling out, "Never negotiate out of fear, spacewalker. You'll lose."

"Speaking from experience, Bellamy?" They shuffle closer together, teeth glinting in the fire light. Finn is not in the mood to back down.

But Bellamy refuses to play into his ploy. His feral grin eases into a smirk. He answers "Yes" (in a voice similar to the one he used when telling Clarke that she _doesn't need to be here_ when the grounder was strung up in the drop ship) and leaves Finn seething in the dark.

* * *

**Author: **Thank you for all your encouragement, favorites, and follows! Each one is precious to me. I would like to re-emphasize this is a SLOW BURN. Because as much as I ship them, I leader-ship Bellamy and Clarke so hard that keeping them as a cohesive unit in the decision making process is so important to me! But everything will be really 'up in flames' in the next chapter. ;)

Also, I didn't add the scene where the Ark's drop ship crashes on Earth _on purpose._ We're getting there, don't worry. Please continue to drop comments and let me know what you're thinking about the story, improvements, or, ya know, whatever.


	5. Chapter Five

**Author 1/25/2015:** A minor inconsistency in the story was addressed. Thank you to whomever pointed it out to me.

* * *

**The Person (I should have been)**

**Chapter Five**

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."

Abraham Lincoln

* * *

Clarke tugs the hat down. The fabric stretches over her hair. The popping of thread warns her it is ready to tear. Maybe she should give it to one of the younger kids who heads it might actually fit? Bellamy insisted she wear it, though, claiming once they started hiking it would not get warmer. She did not believe him when he gave it to her this morning before she shook the sleep from her eyes. But the wind picked up since they set out after breakfast and a chilling drizzle began. They rotate carrying the guns and she cuts his shift short by a few minutes. He doesn't ask why. He _knows_ why, so she slips her hand over his and frees him from the chore. The meeting point with the grounders is ten miles north west up river. Who knows what they might try? He grips his gun tighter, and her smiles stretches her face. They move faster.

Octavia stumbles and the weight shifts. Clarke strains to keep the crates handles in her grasp.

"Sorry, sorry," she pants. The leaves make the ground slippery. Although the rain stopped three miles ago, everything is damp and sticky.

"Yupp, it's cool." Clarke's hair frizzes in uneven waves and itchy curls.

They take a moment to readjust. Bellamy jogs ahead to Jasper, thumbing him to the back of their entourage to keep an eye out. The thin teenager smiles at them as he passes, but Clarke does not like how his safety is already off his gun and the white of his knuckles. She also does not like how Finn and Bellamy keep pace with another at the head of the group; their shoulders strain to be ahead of the other.

So she distracts herself by asking, "What's his name?" Their pace is not unbearable, but she wheezes as she speaks.

"Lincoln." Octavia grins.

Clarke repeats his name, nodding. She wonders, "Was he named after one of the old presidents?"

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

Bellamy traces his way back towards the girls. His head is turned towards the woods, but he is not actually seeing anything. Not with his shoulders next to his ears and his feet stomping over the ground like a petulant child. He is too angry right now to see anything. Clarke watches him double back the way the came to look for anything suspicious. Splashes of mud weigh down his pants and crawl up the back of his legs.

Finn stands at the top of a summit, looking down into the valley. _The view must be gorgeous from there_, she thinks as her grip slides along the plastic handle. She wishes she had gloves. Having sweaty hands and cold fingers is not conducive to carrying a box full of guns. (Clarke doesn't think any condition is conducive to carrying a box full of guns.)

"What's up?" she calls out to Finn. The wind takes away her words and throws them back at her. He is talking to someone else anyways: a man who rises out of the ground like the morning mist.

"Lincoln!" Octavia shouts and redoubles her efforts at carrying the box. Clarke's knees knock against the side a few times before Jasper intervenes.

"Here, let me." He shoulders his gun and replaces Octavia, watching her run off instead of the uneven ground beneath his feet. Clarke doesn't like how the box sways with the transition. Her shoulders burn. A flock of birds pass over head. She is tired and wants to take a break on a mossy rock so she can stare at the pattern of twisting tree branches and breathe hot air onto her numb fingers.

She gets Jasper to pause, but his neck is defined and straining towards Octavia who embraces and kisses their grounder contact with such familiarity that Clarke feels a twist of anger. _She should have been back at camping helping out, _she thinks.

She feels the heat of Bellamy's anger along her side as he comes up behind her. His steps are lighter now. Does it comfort her that he adjusts his movements to be more stealthy? The prickle in her throat becomes a burn. She coughs to try to clear it away. It doesn't work. She returns Jasper's tight smile when their eyes catch, their feeling of betrayal reflecting back at one another. Bellamy shifts so he is right against her back, hand slipping over hers to take her place. Not moving for a moment, she remains suspended in his warmth and anger.

In solitary, she would dream about lounging on couches curled into her father's chest smelling oil and grease from his days work or the quiet stroke of her mother's dry fingers brushing back fly aways. Wells once commented that she was a _toucher._ A hand on a shoulder, a nudge of hips, a press of fingers. "You hug people so soon after meeting them," he fumbled to explain one time as they walked back from lessons, their slippers quiet on the metal walkways. "You like to get right up into their spaces and sometimes don't consider how uncomfortable they are with it."

A rational part of her uses it as an explanation as to why she was so reckless with Finn. Feeling someone move inside of you is as close as you can get physically. However, she knows it is also an excuse. She was desperate. She knew what she was doing. It wasn't sex she regretted. It felt good to release the pressure. To share in hopelessness and remember she wasn't so alone for a few moments. No, she regretted the loving part. Watching the stars at dawn and willingness to comfort him while expecting him to comfort her as well.

"This was your idea, princess," Bellamy says. "Make sure Finn doesn't forget that."

She looks at Bellamy over her shoulder. His eyes are on the back of her neck. "Wouldn't want him to get a fat head, now would we." She doesn't speak with any humor.

"Too late for that, though," Jasper adds, rolling his shoulders back, making him seem broader than when hunched in his normal stance.

Looking up, Clarke sees three pair of eyes watching her. She acknowledges all of them and relinquishes her hold on the gun crate. Cold wind with the taste of something like metal brushes away all of Bellamy's heat. She resists the urges to pull at the hat and goes to see the view from the top of the ridge. (She thinks the beauty will give her strength because this place was just as much hers as it was the grounder's, wasn't it?)

* * *

The bridge distracts Clarke. Its crumbling mortar, vines crawling up and over the sides, and its tenacity to survive. The horses don't help anything either. Broad chests and heaving breaths shooting from their mouths. The grounders sitting on the animals keep shifting. She tries to cover up her flinching by scuffing her feet against the bridge. She can't afford to be jumpy. Jasper and Bellamy with their guns at her back and the grounders and their spears in their hands. She doesn't doubt the accuracy of their throw, even from their place across the bridge. Jasper's scar is still red and tight.

The woman opposite from her is distracted as well, but more so by the box stationed between Finn and Lincoln. Clarke clears her throat to speak, but the grounder interjects: "I am impressed that you came here today after your failed attack on us last night. But I am not sure if I should be impressed by your honesty or your lack of diplomatic skills."

Clarke hip cocks. She's not trying to cover up her fidgeting this time. "Like you have room to talk."

The grounder's eye meet hers for the first time. Maybe Clarke channeled too much Bellamy in that one? So she takes the next step Bellamy would and barrels on, "And that wasn't an attack." The woman crosses her arms and looks down her straight nose at Clarke. _She doesn't believe me, _she thinks. "A dropship, carrying people, failed to land last night, causing that explosion. It wasn't an attack."

She wants to sit down. The boots rubbed enough to make a blister rise and pop. She dreads the hike back to camp. (Something dark and cool and sounding a bit like Murphy asks, _What if you never make it back?_)

The grounder huffs. "Even if it was an attack, it was a poorly planned one. All those bodies. To think that many people sacrificed themselves for a desperate attempt to destroy us. There are skeletons to bury if you continue with that custom."

She can see Clarke flinch this time without the veneer of excitement from horses, nervousness from life-and-death negotiation, and exhaustion from a ten mile hike and too many nights sleeping in fear. It was not a kindness for the woman to have mentioned the skeletons. Both of them knew this. The smell of burnt meat and gas. The taste of ash. The crackle and blistering of skin like Donna's body as the fire consumed her image. It meant the grounders have been watching the camp, too. Observing them and the customs they brought with them from the Ark.

"Then you have nothing to worry about," Clarke says, voice cracking. "All our soldiers, the trained ones anyways, were on that ship." She doesn't add her mother was amongst the dead too.

The woman doesn't smile at this triumphant news. "What about your other people? Are they to join you too, but then also fail to land as you say?"

Bellamy came to the conclusion first last night (or he was the first willing to admit the facts): "Already dead." The grounder's eye twitches up. Clarke clarifies, "There's only us, the one's on the ground. Whatever deal we make today between us will stand."

A smirk of satisfaction curls its way onto her lips, like a cartoon of a satisfied cat who finished lapping up a bowl of cream.

"But can we expect the same from you?" Clarke accuses. (She doesn't need to channel Bellamy on that one; she suspects the grounder's intentions as much as he does.)

The woman purses her lips, but says, "Of course." Clarke doesn't like the charcoal she uses to shadow her eyes.

"Good." Clarke turns her back and motions for the box to be brought forward. Finn struggles to keep up with Lincoln. Their height difference makes the box tilt so more of the weight leans towards Finn. Lincoln steps back once the guns are delivered and joins Octavia at their end of the bridge next to a leaning evergreen. Finn hovers. Clarke faces the grounder, but doesn't speak. The woman stares at Finn. The dark line of raised eyebrows ask, "Well? You going to leave? We're having a discussion and you're not ranked high enough to be here."

Despite the churning of her stomach and the prickling smell of cold water, Clarke shares a smile with the woman when Finn leaves.

"Anya," the grounder says.

"Clarke."

They don't shake hands, but exchange nods. They will never be friends, but at least they see each other as equals.

"Are those the guns as a part of our agreement?"

"Yes." Clarke opens the lid to show Anya the black gleam of the weapons. But she doesn't look down. She looks behind Clarke. At Jasper and Bellamy. "I see you've forgotten a few."

"No."

Anya's eyelids droop, feigning interest in the explanation. Clarke knows she is pissed. "This is our counter offer: we give you twenty of our twenty four guns and every month that goes by without a violent conflict we will share with you three of our live rounds."

Anya scoffs. "You assume that it's us that make the violence, but it is really you."

"Which is why," Clarke defends, "We are held accountable by giving you one of our four remaining guns if this occurs." The suppressed teenager in her wants to say, "Who are the one's with the throw-spears-first-ask-questions-later policy?" She keeps her lips in a thin line instead.

Anya seems to like this idea though, but she asks, "And how many live rounds do you have?"

"Enough to protect ourselves from predators." Passive aggressive, yes, but a threat nonetheless.

Any camaraderie developed slips away like fall leaves in the river rushing beneath their feet. Clarke begins to consider maybe Anya just might have that hot-cold personality. (Or so she hopes.)

"You expect me to accept that compromise?" It sounds just as much a questions as it does a accusation.

Clarke rebuttals, "And you expect us to accept your offer?"

Anya shrugs.

_What's her reasoning for the weapons? What's more important on earth than guns and bullets? _Clarke thinks. She wants to turn around and ask Bellamy. He insisted on weapons on the first place. He showed her why they were so important. It is when she catches the eye on one of horsemen that she remembers the answer. It's the same reason why they've built a wall, why they wash their hands, and quarantine the sick. Hell, it's the same damn reason the grounders attacked Jasper and then later Bellamy's group when they were hunting for Octavia: _Survival._

Clarke raises her voice when she starts to speak, "We don't want the guns to fight. Only one person is trained to actually shoot, the rest of it is for show. Just like the masks and make up you wear. It's the symbol of it. That's why we need only four. Our people need some type of reassurance that we can handle things here on Earth."

Anya moves. Clarke flinches. A safety clicks as it is pushed off and bullet slides into the chamber. Anya moves away from Clarke. The men on horses drop down to the ground and start walking towards the middle of the bridge, replacing their leader in front of Clarke. They pluck the box off the bridge and bring it to one of the horses. Anya sits on top of her own animal looking like a centaur instead of a rider as the men below her argue about the best way to position the box. Clarke remains at the center of the bridge, the gurgle of cool water loud as the grounders melt back into the forest.

When she turns back around Bellamy stands a stride away from her. In the foreground Lincoln and Octavia kiss as Finn and Jasper whoop and dance. The safety on Bellamy's gun is off. She tries to smile, but she sighs instead. They both know this isn't it. Anya won't just walk away and leave them alone.

"It's a start," he says, his eyes dropping to her neck and then swinging back to the forest. "Let's go home, princess."

* * *

They don't make it back to camp for dinner. The drizzle of the morning becomes a downpour with wind pushing them back. Clarke thinks if they still had the guns with them, she would have abandoned them to rust. Jasper's gun is strapped to his back, hands tucked up and under his arms to keep warm. Bellamy refuses to let the weapon out of his hands even though the metal only makes him colder. His lips are blue. Lincoln passes off one of his coats to Octavia, but says they don't need to seek shelter.

"I'm not sure," Finn argues. He looks at Clarke. She keeps walking, stomping her feet to keep them warm. "Who knows how much longer this could go on for."

"It'll be over in a half hour." Japser looks as surprised as everyone else at what he just said.

"How the hell do you know that?" Bellamy asks, his finger's relaxing on his gun.

Leaves fall with the rain around them, startling Clarke whenever one brushes down her arm or lands in her hair. "Well, you see…" Jasper launches into calculations and cloud formations and Clarke remembers he doesn't just make moonshine. He is a chemist with a mind for numbers and formulas. Goofy and love struck as he is here on Earth, he is intelligent. "I mean after Monty and I got sent to the sky box, its not like there was a lot of entertainment so whenever we got time with the archives, we'd look up stuff about meteorology. You know what I mean, Clarke, right?"

Her smile slips. She didn't expect to be pulled into this conversation. "I wasn't allowed access to the archives," she admits, looking out into the darkness. The rain patters around them. Like Jasper said, it has begun to lighten.

"Me neither," Octavia chimes. "You think it was because we were in solitary?"

"Probably."

Jasper tries to keep the conversation light. "You must have been able to do _something_. They couldn't just lock you up. That'd be too cruel."

"The whole premise of the sky box is cruel," Finn says.

Bellamy glares at his back. He took position at the tail of the group, but he drew in closer. No matter how much he frowns and glowers, he is a human and also doesn't want to be alone. "Says the spacewalker," he points out.

Lincoln raises his eyebrows. Octavia laughs, her hair slick and dark like the coat of the horses today. "I'll explain later," she promises, interlacing her fingers with his. His shoulder relax.

"What'd you do, Finn? During your time in the sky box, I mean?" Japser asks, his whole body leaning away from the lovers.

Finn grins, admitting he practiced slight of hand. "The guy I boarded with wasn't too sharp, so I never had a good audience to test it on," he added.

"I read," Octavia joins in.

"I thought you-" Bellamy coughs. Clarke decides to be prudent and not address Octavia's lack of literary skills, "I thought you didn't get access to the archives either?"

"I didn't." Octavia smiles, a tooth gleaming between her lips. "Bellamy snuck stuff in for me."

Her brother grins back at her. "And you actually looked at them? I'm impressed." They banter back and forth and the rain stops and Clarke begins to feel her toes without having to stomp around. The gray of the afternoon deepens into night, but no one questions Lincoln as he leads them on with the siblings arguing over details found in ancient epics.

Laughter dies down after Octavia outwits Bellamy about some line Clarke never heard before, but the creases of smiles stay on people's faces.

"What about you, Clarke, what did you do?" Jasper turns to her. The hollows of his face fill with happiness found in this moment of camaraderie.

She only tells them about the drawings on her walls and floor of the human anatomy, of creatures called scorpions, and what she thought the moon rising might have looked like on Earth before she actually came here. She excludes the portrait of her father and mother. Wells' smiling face as a nine year old after he beat Clarke at spelling bee. Or about the sketch of a newborn baby with its mother's amniotic fluid covering its body and his uncut umbilical cord. Lincoln begins to comment on style and perspective and materials.

The conversation doesn't make the cold of the night go away or fill her growling stomach, but it makes it easier to laugh when Jasper's whole body twitches from a violent shiver or when Finn admits he is craving the protein packets they used to get on the Ark. Lincoln leaves them once the glowing of the camp's fires reaches through the night's darkness, pulling them in. Octavia protests, but Clarke tells her it's better the others hear about what happened with the grounder's rather than be shocked by having one walk right in during the dead of night. So she kisses him, deep and hard and passionate, the way Octavia does everything. Jasper exaggerates gagging, but his shoulders are too tense. He's trying to make this less awkward. Bellamy grumbles about a cold ass and warm tea and pushes passed them.

Clarke waits for Octavia to leave before speaking to Lincoln. Her back is to the light of the camp so she can see the dark paints along his face and the scar on the back of his jaw. "I can't say I am sorry," she says. The skin around his mouth tightens. Does he still have bruises from his beating? Should she offer to take a look at them? (_What good does that do?_)

"I can't say I would forgive you if you did." He tilts his head back like Anya did when she got defensive.

Clarke nods and glances at camp. Someone opened the gate, flooding the area with more light. She leaves without saying anything else.

* * *

**Author**: Thank you for your reviews and patients. Please let me know what you think of the story, the characters, hell, your favorite line! Either way, I hope you enjoyed it! Updates will continue to be spontaneous. You have been warned!

Count down: **12 days**


	6. Chapter Six

**A note:** This chapter aligns with _I Am Become Death_, sort of. I hope everyone's been enjoying the new season!

* * *

**The Person (I should have been)**  
**Chapter Six**

"His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries."  
Erik Larson, _The Devil in the White City_

* * *

Last night after Clarke, Miller, Monroe, and he reviewed the days events while they were gone, he ended up relieving one of the guards from duty because the idea of Lucius prowling the camp while Clarke sleeps makes him jittery. (_You like to gamble, don't you?_) When Sterling comes to replace him in the morning, Bellamy has not moved from his seat next to the gate. He does not offer excuses or apologies. If he is too tired to patrol, then he is too tired to lie and pretend that his shoes do not rub against the tops of his toes making them blister and bleed; that having to walk back with a grounder, an enemy made ally too fast for his body to understand that he doesn't need to be tense and clenched, is more exhausting than arguing with the Princess those first days on the ground; that he had not used all of his bravado yesterday standing at the far end of the bridge while negotiations continued in the middle.

Sterling gives him a hot cup of tea and asks only one question: "Why are you facing towards camp?" _Shouldn't you be looking out?_ lingers like the rising steam between them.

He tries to remember the majority of the hundred do not know about Donna or the crimes those around them committed. "You never know where the danger will come from," he says, walking away.

It is not the most bitter of mornings, but maybe Bellamy's numb to the cold at this point. He detours by the cage Nori constructed for the turkeys. Clarke's hand is between the gaps in the bars. She drags her fingers over the feathers of one of the birds close enough for her to reach. Her coat rides up exposing a strip of skin as she crouches before the cage. It pecks at her hand. Bellamy leaves her cursing and rubbing at the wound for bed.

* * *

Monty wakes him up. Bellamy struggles to lace his boots as he is updated on the situation.

"Grounders were spotted approaching camp," the moonshiner heaves.

"Who saw them?" Bellamy grunts. His shoes laces are caked with mud from yesterday and tying them into knots is not conducive to his state of consciousness— that is, straddling between the pull of exhaustion and the demand of duty. His toes sting from the blisters and he wants to walk barefooted, but he hears Clarke's phantom voice scolding him as she digs shrapnel from the crash out of his feet.

"Ricky did." Bellamy looks up. "He was in the same training profession Finn was. He's almost as good too," Monty expounds. He shuffles from foot to foot.

Bellamy wishes this Ricky kid was better. He hates relying on Spacewalker. "How far out are—"

Shouting explodes through the camp. Monty's eyes widen. Bellamy shoves past him, jogging towards the gate. It is already open and he wants to ask what idiot thought it was a good idea to do that. Clarke (the idiot in question) stands outside of the gate, greeting the entourage of fifteen grounders. Some approach by horseback, others walk carrying packs so full of materials they seem ready to burst out of the top. He sees no gun or weapon at her side. _Again_. The grounders can see just as much as he can how vulnerable she is at the moment. Defenseless_. _He braces to sprint and yank her back inside the walls because what the hell was she thinking? He needs her, remember?

The click of the safety stops him. Perched along the wall are three gunmen, barrels pointed down: _Sterling, Miller, and Myles_. Raven grips one. Though her weapon is shouldered, he sees the red dot indicating the weapon is live and ready to fire. He does not see Octavia, but he hears her laugh and realizes she is in the crowd of grounder and so is Finn. The one hundred press in on each other. No one is comfortable, but everyone is curious. They made an announcements last night about the truce with the grounders. Some people groaned. Some sighed. But it doesn't matter because this is how it will be until the grounders mess something up. (Bellamy damns it will be the one hundred that cause a break in the armistice.)

As the grounders dismount or rest their packs on the ground, Bellamy takes his place beside Clarke. She is taunt like a snare. Although she welcomes the grounders, she finds their presence as welcoming as Bellamy does. Neither of them expected to have contact with the grounders after their meeting yesterday. He see no guns or the previous leader their negotiated with. He recognizes Lincoln standing behind Octavia. They lock eyes. Neither of them nod, but acknowledgment passes between them the two men.

A woman with skin likes Wells and intricate scarring and tattoos around her eyes steps forward, followed behind by Lincoln and another stranger. Hilts of daggers sit on their waists, axes rest on their backs, and bows drape across their bodies, waiting to be used. Even though he knows Miller's hand is steady and he is a better shot than Bellamy, that Raven is five strides behind them, that he would be able to get Clarke to safety before she would get hurt, he hates the empty weight due to the lack weapons at his side. It makes his skin crawl. Ever since they grounded he had a handgun, or a knife, or a spear. Now, only his body is a weapon and up against the grounders...Bellamy tries not to think about how long he would last.

The woman approaches with the reigns of a horse in her hand. Clarke twitches. Confused, he glances at her. The skin around her eyes is lax and her jaw is loose. This is the first time he has seen her shoulder's so relaxed down her back. She stares at the horse, taking in the blue paint swirling down its face and the weave of its mane.

Bellamy takes the lead and asks, "Can we help you?" He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jacket to hide his fists. He does not like having his hands empty. His hatchet sits under the blankets he threw off his bed in haste to leave.

Clarke straightens. She does not like how he delivered the questions. _Well, she is the one who opened the gates prematurely, _he thinks, not willing to make excuses for his bluntness. He did not want to appear weak before these strangers.

"We hear you have a healer amongst your people," the woman says. She is not looking at Clarke. _She doesn't know. _Bellamy wonders why Lincoln did not mention it but he tilts his head slightly in his direction. Both of them are men of action rather than words. Lincoln understands all that Bellamy is not saying: _Thank you. _Now the one hundred were the ones with the power and the knowledge. Additionally, it offers Clarke anonymity, thus protection. The less these people know the better in his opinion.

"We do," Bellamy confirms. "What do you need from them?"

The woman raises her eyebrows. "You presume we need your help."

He scoffs and rubs at his tear ducts to brush away the crust leftover from his sleep. "Am I wrong?"

She frowns and holds her head up higher. "We're here to offer a proposition." Bellamy remain silent. Clarke continues to stare at the horse as it shuffles in place, not used to being kept in one spot for so long. "We also have a healer." She gestures to the stranger on her right. Like the horse, he has paint carving a dark path from his hair line to his beard. "But our healers do not know the same thing as each other. We suggest an exchange of information to better them both."

"Seems a little uneven doesn't it?" he presses. They are the new kids on the block, easy to be bullied. If he was a grounder, that how he would approach it anyways.

"And yet, two of your people who have sustained serious injuries not only survived, but avoided permanent damage and are thriving, are they not?" Bellamy does not like how much information this woman is privy too. It makes him suspicious. "Clearly your healer has something of merit to offer," the woman continues.

His back straightens, and Bellamy leans back on his heels. _Damn straight, _he thinks.

Clarke interjects. "This could be arranged."

The woman smiles. Bellamy never interacted with Anya, but he knows this person is nothing like the woman on the bridge. This leader shouted a few words to her people. He realizes too late they speak another language. He grips his hands tighter, becoming aware how long it have been since he trimmed his nails.

The other grounders begin to unpack. Clarke frowns. "Wait, we haven't discussed terms yet."

"We will, but for now, my people are tired and need rest. Perhaps we can trade a few things with each other, too," the woman says and she brushes the nose of her horse to calm him down.

Bellamy cannot say the woman threatened them, but he feel threatened all the same. His knees are locked. His eyes scan the crowd. He moves so his shoulder is aligned ahead of Clarke and is ready to move in front if need be. The one hundred need her. She cannot die. No medic and they're all screwed.

Clarke does the speaking from there. Agreeing the two healers will primarily meet outside of camp in a temporary neutral zone that will be created. This is also where any trades must happen. If any of the hundred or the grounders cross boundaries without proper clearance from both sides first than disciplinary action will be taken. As the woman listens to the Princess' demands, she nods her head and adds little. She is short, yet the scars over her eyes were not put there out of some macabre fashion sense (though, in his opinion, macabre was exactly how he would describe the grounders with their clothing of leather and furs, jewelry and decorations of bones).

He directs the layout of the neutral zone as Lincoln translates the demands to the other party members. His feet do not bother him as much and he is able to unclench his fists and bring them out from his jacket's pockets. Confident and proud, he leaves Clarke's side to do his work.

* * *

Delinquents bolster the fires as the sun begins to set. Bellamy hovers between the neutral space and the gate into the drop site. Jasper lingers behind him, twitching.

"I think I'm going to go give Ulric a break from guard duty. You know. Fresh eyes and all," he says.

Bellamy rubs away snot dripping down his nose from the cold. "I can't let you do that Jasper." He flits his eyes between starring at the neutral zone and where Octavia mingles with the other grounders around their fires.

"What?" He sounds like he was punched in the gut, air rushing out at once.

Bellamy looks at him and wishes he did not. "You heard me and you know why," he continues. "You're a good fighter and solid wingman. I need you in the right mind for this."

Jasper head shrinks farther down his neck as his shoulders pull up to his ears. Bellamy puts a hand on a shoulder to stop its progression. He does not need Jasper going into a shell and blocking everything from site. He needs as many eyes and ears as he can right now. He cannot do this alone. Everyone in camp must appear competent and in control. Nori restrains his mumbling. Stephanie and Krill keep their lover's arguments contained to their tent. Quinn checks the spearheads instead of girl's assess. Now, it is Jasper's turn. "Can you do this?" Bellamy asks.

In the moment it takes Jasper to nod his head, all Bellamy hears is Clarke's sigh of disbelief as she touches the horse's coat after she asks permission from Indra, the woman leading the group, to pet the animal.

"Of course you can," Bellamy says, squeezing Jasper's shoulder one time before turning to look out to the neutral zone. The grounders disorient him. Seeing them before him and having to restrain himself. He doesn't even have the pleasure of thinking that they would be leaving when the day ends. They will be camping out for almost four days while the exchange of information is made. Both parties understood time in a separate manner so when the hundred watched as the grounders unrolled blankets and pulled out messed kits you can imagine their horror.

The grounders were equally confused, however. Nyko, the healer, scoffed at the idea of leaving that day. "It took us two days to get here and you expect us to leave right away?"

Clarke touched his elbow then, warning him not to say, "Hell ya I do." It took a lot of control and he isn't sure how much he has left. _Let Octavia be with Lincoln. Don't shut the gates. Command the guards to have the safety on their guns. Play nice. Clarke doesn't need protection. She's safe. We're _safe. He clenches the blade of his hatchet as the first grounder tent goes up.

* * *

Two days go by and any misunderstanding are diffused before any violence occurs. Nyko goes to and from the camp to see Clarke's set up inside the drop ship. He comes back tell tales to his companions. Bellamy cannot understand what he is saying, but he likes how respect and awe seeps into the faces of the grounders who wear masks around their necks and sleep with weapons like blankets. Indra is the only other grounder allowed access to the camp. She gives all of her weapons up before entering and it almost resulted in _complications_. Clarke's cheeks paled like they do when she is angry, but he would not budge on this. Indra toured the camp and its featured and all her items were returned as she left.

Few hundred went to the neutral zone. Less into the temporary camp set up outside their walls. Does this make him happy knowing they distrust the grounders as much as he does? In a way, but Clarke keeps on talking about the horses and it is getting harder to ignore her offers for him to join her one time in brushing them down. It is sometimes after lunch time when all of his self-discipline breaks and he gives in to this one thing.

"When are you going to visit the horses?" he asks Clarke mid-morning as she sits by the fire and enjoys the mild weather. One of her hands is tucked into the sleeve of her jacket. Fingers peek out enough from the other one so she can sketch out a leaf sample given to her by Nyko. The book is balanced on her knee and with how much she leans into the warm of the fire, it looks like it could shift off and burn away. Part of him thinks it is silly to record everything like that. They had her, so what did they need it for? Then, he remembers she is human like the rest and can die just as easily. (He remembers what she looks like as he held her above death's door, the thick carved pikes jutting out of the ground ready to devour her.)

This is when he appreciates her forethought because if something happens, than the one hundred might have more of a chance than they did before without any of the crumbling, delicate journals to guide them. Of course, though, this is also when he gets angry. Does she not trust him to keep her safe? (_She shouldn't. _It sounds like Murphy. It sounds like Dax. It sounds like Charlotte. _She shouldn't._)

She stops. "Soon." Her hair is tangled in the back. "You wanna come?"

"Yeah." He grins. "And maybe we'll leave with one of our own."

Clarke likes the idea. She tucks the sketch book under an arm and moves towards the exit, passing on to him the information she was told by Indra. Nori sits with another grounder, a stick in his hands and blueprints in the dirt between them, his stomach bulging out from the bottom of his shirt.

"It's amazing, isn't it?"

"What?" he grunts.

Clarke raises an eyebrow. She does not believe his feigned indifference. She says what they are both thinking. "We didn't even have to ask Nori to do this. He knows what needs to get done and does it."

"Well, he's the one in charge of building places that don't get soaked in a rain storm, so he's got some pretty strong motivation," he says, but grins nonetheless because she is right. The one hundred are stepping up. They showed the Ark that they exiled their most valuable assets and now the grounders are being shown these _kids_ have more merit than just a good healer. They have chemists who know how to craft things together in a way that has been lost in the Aftermath. They have hard workers and loyal people. A mechanic who builds things from scraps of toys and puts them together.

He should have known it would not last. But for those few seconds he stood side by side with Clarke and petted the velvet snout of the horse and brushed his fingers through it wiry mane, he let himself believe in the hope Earth once promised for him.

It is broken by shouting and screams.

The few meters it takes them to cover from their place along side the horse and in to the camp has Bellamy flexing his fingers and reaching for a gun out of the hands of one of the less competent guards. Fran is on her hands and knees. Blood dribbles down her chin. A bowl of spilled berries press beneath her knees.

He looks for a spear. An arrow. A grounder. But a majority of them went hunting after lunch. The circle surrounding the girl makes it difficult to make their way to her. Bellamy ends up shoving people out of the way for Clarke so she can have some space to examine yet another patient.

"Fever. Clammy," Clarke continues to list off other symptoms, "Elevated heart rate. Damn it. Everyone back away."

The diameter of the circle expands. Bellamy does not move from his spot a pace behind her. "What does she have?"

Clarke's jacket has a hole where the shoulder and sleeve meets and he gets even a better view of her tangled hair from here. She takes too long to answer.

"Clarke—"

"I need to get her to the med bay." He can't see her face. Her lips moving. The expression in her eyes. The creasing of her brow. Her voice is divorced from her body.

Bellamy swings the gun he stole so it slaps against his hip. "Let me help you—"

"No."

He scoffs, watching as Clarke pulls Fran up from her feet. "What do you mean, no?" He steps forward.

"I said stay back." This time he can see Clarke's eyes. The hair on his arms stand on end. "I don't know what she has. I don't know if it's contagious. So no one touch her."

(_Then why the hell are you the one touching her? _he does not say.)

"Okay, Princess." Bellamy steps around her and Fran, shouting at people to clear the way. It does not take much coaxing. He goes into the drop ship to clear out anyone squirreled away, and Clarke makes him stand at the bottom of the ramp as she drags Fran up. Blood is in her hair.

"I need Nyko. He might know what this is and how to help," she says over her shoulder.

"Whatever you need," he agrees. It does not feel so cold out right now. They catch each other's eyes once and then the curtain falls, separating them.

He takes one breath and uses it to call out orders: "Where the hell does Fran sleep? No one go near it. Wash hands. Boil your damn water. Keep working on winter supplies."

Nori hovers by the gate with the grounder he was talking to, the only one left behind from the hunting party. They both lean away from Bellamy when he stomps up to them. "When are they suppose to be back?" he growls.

"Before dark," the man shrugs. He is short and thick around the middle with no hair on his head and more than enough trailing down from his beard.

"Not good enough." The sun was no where near the horizon, even during these days when night comes faster and faster and leaves slower and slower in the morning.

"Ricky. Ulric. Monroe." They run to meet him. "Find those damn grounders and bring them back. Princess needs their healer's help."

Bellamy get Monty to check on his latest brew. Retching and weeping echo out into the camp. People linger, looking up at the fluttering curtain. Did they want Clarke to come out and reassure them that it was really just a small bone lodged in Fran's throat or a case of bad food poisoning? He did.

"Keep working," he warns instead and when they start complaining they have no work to do he grins so that all his teeth are showing. "Well then, let's fix that."

He ends up having Nori begin his initial plans for housing.

"We go underground," he explains. "There are old, incomplete mining tunnels below us. All we have to do is excavate the entrances and maybe carve out rooms."

It sounds like a lot of work. Maybe too much work for those with less initiative (and there were several of those intermingled in the hundred). Plus, they did not have enough shovels or picks for that. At max he could have five people working on that at once, changing out every thirty minutes...he calculates it in his head, nodding. "Then let's get it done." Bellamy collects the first five and leaves Nori to explain the work to them.

"Would you like my help?" The grounder stands at his shoulder. Bellamy's lips draw up into a sneer, but he coughs to bury his pride down.

"Help Nori figure his shit out, will ya?"

The man nods and moves towards the crowd holding their crude shovels and crafted axes.

"Hey," Bellamy calls. "What's your name?"

The man smiles, his forehead crinkling as much as his eyes and Bellamy realizes this man must be at least sixty years old. Not impressive by Ark standards, but on a place like Earth where everything works to kill you, respect builds in him for this man with too much beard. "Bernad."

Bellamy nods. He can't saw thank you, not yet. Bernad clasps Nori on the shoulder, intruding into the group of diggers. Jordan steps away, but Ron, the tallest guy out of the hundred, grips his shoulder and smiles.

Someone else shouts from across camp: "It's Harry. Holy Shit. Harry's got it!"

"Get them to work!" Bellamy says to Bernard, hoping to cause a distraction from the descending helll. He shoves someone over as he runs to the next victim.

Harry, one of Murphy's crew, is not throwing up like Fran. Instead, blood drips from the corner of his eyes and out of his nostrils. He sits on the ground right outside of his tent, gripping his hair and rocking his body. His jacket lays next to him and sweat stains develop under his arms and down his back, but he keeps shaking.

Sterling steps up. Bellamy yanks him back. "Go tell Clarke. Don't go inside; stand right outside and shout into her. Do you understand?"

Sterling stares at Harry who starts to mutter. Bellamy shakes him.. "Do you understand?"

He does not answer. He breaks away, running to get Clarke.

When the hunting party returns, there are twenty one patients in the drop ship and it takes all of Bellamy's glares and threats to get just the guards to do their rounds. He gave up on everything else. Friends do not sit close to each other. Lovers do not share kisses. Enemies do not fight. Fear of getting the contagion grips them all.

He checks his pulse and licks his lips, waiting to taste blood.

* * *

"Don't move," Bellamy shouts from just inside the gate.

Lincoln tenses. Indra does not let go of her spear. The two dead deer swing on poles sitting on the shoulder's of some grounders. He wants to throw up.

"Bellamy, what's going on?" Finn pants. _Good, _he thinks, _They rushed here_. "Ricky said that Fran got sick and that—"

"Fran's dead and so are two others."

Nyko pulls down a pack from his horse. "Show me them." Bellamy does not like how he feels as if he has to look up into this man's eyes even through they are the same height.

Bellamy does not warn him that he might get sick, too. That Clarke is the only one who comes to collect the shivering, hemorrhaging bodies of the delinquents when they collapse.

"Let go of me!" Indra holds Octavia in place. "What the hell do you think you're doing? Those are my people in there!"

"No, Octavia, stay here," Bellamy says. His voice cracks. If Octavia starts bleeding from the eyes... if tremors shake her body so hard that she hurts herself... if Clarke has to come collect her, too... "You, too, Finn," Bellamy orders. "I need to know at least some of our people won't get infected."

"Where's Clarke?" Finn asks.

It is a stupid question. "Where she belongs," Bellamy responds, stepping into the camp. "Close the gates!" he shouts.

Octavia screams and howls over the crunching of the gate falling back into place. Nyko evaluates Bellamy. He does not make a snide comment or excuse; he lets this man, stranger, enemy, see him for a moment.

When they break gazes, they start moving again.

Clarke finds them first. It is an accident. She was looking for Connor, another patient she was warned about. She is not wearing her jacket. Her hands are clean, but her shirt hangs loose with the weight of all the blood it carries. "Nyko," she says. Her hair is knotted high on her head. "In the drop ship. I think this is something specific to Earth. I never encountered anything like this on the Ark."

He obeys, pausing to squeeze her shoulder. Her eyes are wide and the sunset streams into her irises, lighting them up.

"Is there anything we can get you, Princess? Seaweed, plants, fresh water. Tell me now because it will be too dark soon to send anyone out soon." He steps closer to her. She angles her body back.

"The cure be nice."

His lips move up. "Yeah, I'll work on that one."

"Thanks."

Monty calls her away, reminding her that people are dying and they need her because they seek comfort in her arms. The sun glows on her back before she collapses onto the ground and into shadows.

Everyone shouts her name and presses in, but his is the only one pressing them _back_. "Bellamy, Bellamy!" It is Jasper. Someone gave him a gun. "You gotta help her. You gotta help Clarke."

Of course. That is what he wants to do, but it is not what he should do. Not as the leader. (_What we do to survive..._)

Some one slips past the barrier he made with his outstretched arms. Finn whispers hope and kindness down onto Clarke's neck as he lifts her up into his arms. _If he got in..._

"Clarke!" Octavia pushes the blond hair away from her face and uses her sleeve to wipe at the blood dribbling down from Clarke's eyes. It makes it worse. Now blood is smeared all over her cheek and lips.

"Fuck. Octavia!" Bellamy reaches for his sister, but she moves beyond his grasp, urging Finn to move faster to the drop ship and promising Clarke that she will take care of the other patients. She does not need to worry. "Just feel better alright?"

Raven steps beside him. She touches her nose like he does, checking for blood. Waiting for it to come. "How the hell did it come to this?"

He sighs and asks Miller when the last time the guard switched out. "Lucus is missing," he replies with instead. "He was suppose to fill in for Drew, but he didn't show. That guy likes when people do shit for him, but he likes it when he gets to hold a gun in his hand more."

"Raven, with me."

"Where are we going?" She refuses to move.

"Patient zero," he mutters and clarifies, "We need to find who brought this illness in."

"What makes you think that it wasn't the grounder? They're probably sabotaging us!" Raven throws her hands up, frustrated.

He thought of that, but Fran was the first person Clarke took away. _Fran_… Why her out of anyone else? She kept to herself and had a nasty habit of latching onto Lucus even though he spoke to her in only demeaning ways.

"Hey! Bellamy, what the hell is going on?" Raven pulls him back.

Does she not see it? Why does she need told? It is obvious. Then, Octavia's voice explains as if she's beside him, "You haven't told her. You haven't told anyone. Only you and Clarke know about the list."

They are the only ones who know of the census taken on the crimes of the delinquents. Small stars indicate those who sentences into the sky box were the most concerning. Bellamy pulls away and keeps moving. He does not have time to explain. (How can he explain?)

Bellamy takes his hatchet in his hand, flicking it with his wrist. The weight reminds him of all the choices he's made up to this point, all that he has fought for. The battle has not ended and he will keep on fighting.

Raven finds him, but Lucus is dead in his tent already. Face purple and eye expanding out of their sockets with his hands clenched at his side. Bellamy sighs. He needs Lucus to be alive. He needs the information he thought Lucus would have provided. _Useless in death as he was in life_, he thinks.

Raven leaves to find someone to get rid of the body because they cannot have dead people just laying around. It is unhygienic, but, most importantly, messed up. Bellamy frowns, pausing with his head half out of the tent and his shoulders brushing along the ties meant to keep the flaps closed for privacy. He hears wheezing.

There. In the corner. He flips over the cot finagled from seats out of the drop ship. Huddled in blankets is Murphy. "You."

His face is torn, and he looks up at Bellamy with glassy eyes. "I had no where else to go."

Bellamy fist knocks Murphy out on the first blow.

* * *

"Patient zero," Clarke says. She should be resting, sleeping on a hammock or drinking some shit at least. But instead she keeps using these medical terms Nyko can't follow. She crouches, holding a cloth over her face as she cleans away the worst of Murphy's cuts. The alcohol rouses him enough so he can explain his appearance. Bellamy hates when Clarke shows him the splits nails and bloody cuticles. He does not want to feel pity for this bastard.

"Did your people do this?" she demands of Nyko. He is across the bay, holding Fox on her side so she doesn't choke on her blood the same way Lucus did. Her red hair looks like a mass of exposed copper wires.

Nyko stares at Murphy. "Yes."

Bellamy curses. Finn frowns. Octavia moves from patient to patient, making them take sips of the water (her bedside manner is something to be desired, though). Clarke uses tweezers to pull out the worst of the splinters. "Tell me."

Murphy says, "Your so weak you have to align with the enemy now, is it?" As he laughs blood bubbles past his lips

"There is nothing weak about making alliances. It's how you become stronger—"

"Bellamy!" Clarke interrupts. She wipes blood form the corner of her eyes.

His eyebrows draw together. "What?" Was she really going to get angry at what he was saying?

"Keep your mouth and nose covered with the rag. If you're going to come in here, that's a part of our deal. You can't get sick, too." Clarke pours moonshine over Murphy's hands. Bellamy smirks from behind the cloth. He does not mention that dizziness and disorientation already overcomes him at random intervals, forcing him to stand still for a few seconds or maybe taking a seat next to a fire because he hates the idea of getting blood all over his clothes and shoes. Especially his socks. He does not want to ruin his socks.

Clarke coughs. Murphy flinches. Finn holds her up as she looses balance and tilts to the side. Bellamy cannot move.

"He was found stealing from our stores," Nyko explains. Finn clutches her shoulder's as she keeps coughing. Blood and phlegm. "We did not know he was with you, the Sky People, until he promised information about you if we would lessen his punishment. Anya wanted a hand cut off for his insolence. Tristan was the one who tortured him for more information." Nyko splints Murphy's thumb, but does not continue the through inspection Clarke was doing.

Bellamy appreciates how this man does not apologize, but also does not give Murphy kindness. He does not deserve it (_And neither do you_).

"Patient zero," Clarke repeats, taking a fist to her mouth. Her throat spazzes. She does not throw up. She swallows it down.

"Clarke," Finn whispers. Warns. Will she not listen and understand that she needs to stop?

"He was the one who brought this to us, wasn't it? He probably contracted it while being tortured," she continues. Her eyes are blood shot and the blues of her eyes dilute to gray of pain.

"No, it was given to him."

Bellamy grips the bars of a shelving unit. The drop ship is hot with fever and Octavia's frustration when Connor cannot keep down the water she slips between his cracked lips.

"It was Anya's intention to release him back into your camp if the meeting at the bridge turned sour. To weaken you for an attack," Nyko explains. He forces Clarke to wash out her mouth with moonshine.

Bellamy levels his gun at the grounder's head. "So that's what you're doing, huh? Just waiting to pick us off?"

The muscles on Nyko's neck pulse and flex, but he does not move, not with the cold circle of the barrel barring down on his skin. Even if his hands shake and his vision keeps shifting, Bellamy will not miss at this distance.

"Bellamy, stop, what are you doing?" Finn.

"Bell!" Octavia.

"The prisoner escaped. He killed two of our guards in the process." Nyko.

Moaning and cries and fear.

Clarke grabs the gun, her hands slapping the metal. He could just twist the gun to the left and her grip would fall away completely. Instead, he lowers the gun. He never even took off the safety anyways.

"Is there anything we can do?" Clarke does not break her eye contact with him.

"No."

Finn growls. "Nothing? There's no treatment!? Why have some people gotten sick and other haven't?"

Bellamy wants to know this too. He drops his eyes to the floor. Black blood and dirt and it smells like the day Bellamy shot Jaha.

"Some people don't get the sickness."

"Immune. They're immune," Clarke sighs. Those were people she would not have to worry about. At least they would survive.

Nyko shrugs off the technical jargon of the Ark. "More people will die. I don't know how many, but it will happen. Turn people on their sides so they don't choke when they vomit—"

"Asphyxiation. Aspiration." Clarke holds her head in her hands.

"Make sure they get enough water—"

"Dehydration."

"And wait it out."

She does not proffer a technical term, but Bellamy knows if she did not pass out, she probably would have. Her body curls into itself as Finn struggles to get her into a hammock. Her boots catch on the fabric.

Nyko bring a new patient to an empty spot in the drop ship. It is empty because Evey died a half hour ago. _I have to tell Jordan, _he thinks.

He stares down at Murphy. His hair is slick and clumping around his forehead. He glowers up at Bellamy. Daring. Challenging. But he flinches when Bellamy shuffles forward. In that moment, he decides that son of bitch is not worth his time.

Finn steps away to go find scraps of fabric to clear away some of the blood from Clarke's face. When Bellamy fills his place, he assumes she is asleep. He reaches into the hammock and begins to untie her boots. It takes him a moment because his fingers are having trouble pinching the shoelaces.

"You're a shoe thief now?" Her eyes are not open, but her mouth is as she pants, the fever making her squirm and shiver.

He grins, focusing on getting the next boot off. "Yeah, I wanna see if yours might be better. Mine have been rubbing my toes too much. Maybe a tighter fit is just what I need."

Her laughter is a sigh. He drops the boots under her hammock. Finn stops to help Octavia get Ron on his side.

"Bellamy."

"Yeah?" He leans in because her voice is as quiet as the dawn.

She touches his lips. He opens his mouth. What is he to say? "Bellamy." She stares at her fingers. He stares too. Blood. He wipes his face, coming away with more blood.

"I told you to keep your face covered." Her eyes bleed or maybe she is crying. How was he to tell.

"That you did princess, that you did."

Octavia takes him to a mattress. He shakes and his stomach lurches and the smell is what is worst. Hard and sour and it makes him gag all over again. He admits things to his sister he never wanted to share, but she needed to know that no matter how much he orders he around, confines her, or is just plain overbearing that he is human, too and terrified because if he does not survive—

He does not dream when he sleeps.

* * *

**Author:** The end really isn't meant to be a cliffhanger because we all know that he survives. I won't be diverging on that aspect! A lot of action happened in this chapter and I hope the transitions were clean and you all were able to follow.

Please let me know if there is any lingering confusion or just let me know what you thought in general. Each favorite and alert make me smile and each review I carry with me as I write out this story. Thank you, thank you, thank you.


	7. Chapter Seven

**Note: **Things get pretty crazy from here on out. Please continue to review so that I can get a read on how you're receiving the story!

**The Person (I should have been)  
Chapter Seven**

"Anything can happen in just one day."  
Gayle Forman, _Just One Day_

* * *

Raven holds Murphy at gun point. The sky is gray, but it will not rain. Indra said that, but Clarke has been on the ground long enough that the weather patterns on earth are becoming more familiar so she does not need told. (As much as she appreciates the exchange of information, being told how to do things again by adults makes her clench her teeth.)

Clarke stands two steps from where Murphy kneels in the ground, hands raised above his head. A mob of the delinquents are a wall of hate behind Raven. Jordan's face is puffy from crying. Finn talks to Raven, trying to get her to put the gun down. _History repeats itself_, she thinks as Raven tells Finn just what she thinks of his pacifism.

She sways, the newest to have recovered from the sickness, dried blood cracking down her cheeks. Raven's hair is loose from her slick ponytail and black as the gun.

"Raven, he helped us! Who knows how many other people would have gotten infected if he didn't!" Finn pleads, his hands open, ready to accept the gun if Raven comes to the same conclusion as he. Clarke does not bet it on it though. She stands at the bottom of the ramp leading up to the drop ship.

Octavia hisses, "Aren't you going to do anything?"

Clarke ignores her because she would have to explain that she wants to kill Murphy and save him. That she agrees with Raven and she agrees with Finn.

"How's Bellamy?" she asks.

"Fine, sleeping. You know that. You're the one who told me he would be fine." The little sister clenches the fabric of Clarke's jacket between her fingers. "You weren't lying were you?"

"What?" Clarke looks away for a second. "God, no, I wouldn't do that."

Finn screams for Raven to stop; the one hundred scream for vengeance. The gun clicks. Murphy cries.

Raven presses the trigger again. Nothing. "What?"

Clarke moves down next to Murphy, yanking him on his feet. "No one's killing anybody, today," she announces. "We already have eighteen to burn, there is no need to make it nineteen."

Raven frowns, her nostrils wide and teeth gritting. "What the hell, Clarke! He brought this down on us. He deserves _some_ type of punishment."

"And it will be decided, but not until our guests leave." Everyone stares at Nyko and Lincoln, the only two grounders who came into camp the last three days to help manage the sick and dead. She braces against Murphy like a crutch. She lost blood and has not recovered enough of it to be standing for too long. He is looking at her, but she does not dare to look back. He will see how much she wants Raven to just shoot him. Then, he will win. His chaos and hatred will win and Clarke dares no let that happen again.

Pieces of people fall away to go back to work or to mourn or to drink moonshine. They can't handle this confusion. Enemies made allies and sparing the life of a man they tried to kill. Everything must seem to be a conundrum for them.

Octavia and Lincoln share an embrace. Nyko leaves to report to Indra the situation. It is time they leave. Clarke would argue they should have left as soon as Ricky spotted them coming, but what she learned from their healer is indispensable.

Murphy and Clarke struggle up the ramp together. The curtain is pulled back to air out the tangy smell of blood from the drop ship. She thinks it will never leave and her work space will be stained forever by those dead.

Bellamy is on his hand and knees, coughing, but no blood. He scrambles to his feet, shaking and alive. "What happened?"

He glances between Murphy and her. "Did he do something? Are you okay?"

She nods. "Right now, yeah. Yeah, I'm okay." She pushes off Murphy, commanding him to a corner where a still recovering Conner wheezed, his black skin shiny and nostrils flared and mouth open.

Bellamy watches as she collects a few things from around the drop ship and then collapses onto the mattress beside him, slipping in blood and vomit. She would clean it and everything in this ship because she cannot stand the stink of fear and weakness. It is too potent.

"Here." She hands him a cup of water.

He takes a few sips.

"You good, too?"

"Right now, yeah," he mimics.

She passes a rag to him. "You've got stuff all over your face." She helps him get the worst of it off by indicating where he needs to scrub harder or he missed a spot of his left- no, his other left. He grumbles if she is being bossy then she must be feeling better.

She replies, "And you're already arguing. Your prognosis is promising, Bellamy Blake. You're on your way to a full recovery."

They share smiles. Wrinkles full of grief (_eighteen bodies_) and creases of determination. They must survive this. There are sixty nine others they must live for. This they cannot forget, but they have to keep moving.

He finishes cleaning the rest of his face and downs the water left in the cup. "Suppose we should go take care of those grounders outside our walls by now, don't you think?"

Clarke sighs. "I think they got the hint."

Bellamy stares at the fluttering parachute. She rubs her hands together. Night falls and she will sleep, but for now, she finds peace and rest beside Bellamy as they stare out, watching the work of their people like a movie. He asks about the commotion outside with Raven and she tells him.

"Good thing we replaced all the bullets for duds, huh?" He says it like he doesn't mean it, glaring at Murphy who picks at a scab on the back of his hand. Clarke does not warn him that it might scar. This way what was on the outside would match what was on the inside. (Then both Bellamy and she need a few more scars, too.)

"How much longer can we keep this up?" she whispers, clenching her hands together. "It was not the grounders that brought the disease, Bellamy. It was one us. How can we protect ourselves from...ourselves?" She sighs. Pulls at her hair, using her fingers to comb though the easiest of knots and sits there picking at the worst. Bellamy does not respond. She readjusts her seating and they stay like that until she snaps up her neck too hard, jolting awake from the falling sensation associated with sleeping when sitting up.

They leave the drop ship together. The camp is quiet and Miller nods at Bellamy as they walk by the gate to check in.

"Guards are on four hour shifts. I've got only two guns out right now apposed to all four." His eyes flicker the shifting shadowing of this new night. Clouds expand across the sky and there will be no moon and no silver light. "I've got this," Miller confirms.

"Yeah, you do." Bellamy breaks off from them and staggers towards his tent.

Clarke turns away, but Miller says, "Sleep in for once, will ya?"

He cannot see her smirk, but her voice is high with amusement. "I think I can fulfill such a request."

Finn is waiting in her tent for her. He hugs her. The light from a fire outside of her tent shows the worry, the relief, and the love in stark contrast to the smeared dirt around his face and his shortened hair slicked back by sweat and oil. She thinks he needs to go wash and not touch her. Who knows what could be growing on the lapels of his jacket. His body heat reminds her that she is alive and she has a chance to keep living. She does submit to the comfort there, though, because it is not the type of comfort she deserves. It is full of half promises and petty explanations.

She is the daughter of the once Senior Environmental Engineer of the Ark and Chief Medical Officer. Her best friend is Wells Jaha who was willing to take the blame for her father's death. She works with Bellamy Blake who inspires and annoys her. She knows how to slip a dislocation in so it causes minimal damage and pain. Healing and killing are her dealings. Pain she knows as well as love. With Finn clutching at the back of her jacket and cheek on her ear, she feels weighed down.

She needs to sleep, but not with him. "Finn, go to Raven, talk to her," she says. He stops moving his hands in circles on her back. (As much of a toucher as she is, she hates that type of soothing touch that seems to say: _I know you are about to fall apart, but do not worry, I am the strong one here_.) "You need to be with her. She is pissed as hell at me and that is okay, but that cannot happen with you. You have known each other for too long. Do not let this happens." She knows the gaping pain of loosing a best friend, someone who knows you so well that they could fix a plate of food for you and you wouldn't have noticed the difference if you had done it yourself.

He pulls away to look at her. His eyes are not as dark as Wells', though, because Finn might be a friend, but he doesn't know how to fix a plate of food for her. "Okay. Alright." She steps to the side, showing him to the exit.

"I'll see you tomorrow."

He stops at her shoulder. He wants to kiss her. Lean in and brush his lips against the corner of hers. But he doesn't. "Good night," he says. She is already taking off her boots before he's left.

* * *

Monty scrubs at the floor. The drop ship echoes back the slosh of water and alcohol and his grunts of labor. He is the only one here. He looks up when Clarke enters. His lips fold so it is like there is a smile pressing down on a frown (or maybe the frown is pressing down the smile). Clarke rips down hammocks and tosses them outside. Fabric slaps against the mental ramp and she keeps moving around the floor. Lifting up items and tossing them out. Everything needed to be boiled or at least aired out.

She did not expect help in this endevour. Monty must have started when Bellamy and she reinforced their trading agreement with Indra's tribe before they left for their own village late this morning. They talk about their favorite reruns of soccer matches and awesome scores. Clarke tires after an hour and gets Monty to take a break with her. She sits on the metal of her operating table and he slides to be on the ground. It finally looks gray again after his hard work. They munch on dried roots.

"Clarke," Monty begins.

She makes no noise because he has been waiting to say this as they cleaned the drop ship. He might mutter something and she would call out that she _did not catch that and could he repeat it?_ But he says, _forget it. Don't worry about it._ instead. She is happy he doesn't plan to keep it to himself.

"I'm sorry that I didn't come into the drop ship and help." Clarke enjoys the sunlight coming in and how the last leaves stir outside and brush in, bringing crisp, chilled air into the fetid drop ship. "At first I thought I could, but people kept on throwing up and I didn't want to get sick. And then bodies were being carried out!"

The grounders helped them build a pyre for their deceased early this morning. A majority of the remaining delinquents did not come out for the lighting ceremony. Murphy stirs the coals every half hour so that everything burns. Clarke's stomach twists at the idea of scavengers coming and picking at the bones of those dead. (What disturbs her the most, though, is thinking that she could have easily been one of those people.)

"I should have come in and helped. You guys needed help. Maybe I could have prevented someone's death by getting them water or turning them to the side—"

"Stop." Clarke is familiar with this kind of thinking. It leads to a place of self-loathing and dissatisfaction. She has enough of that to deal with herself and with Bellamy, she does not need Monty wallowing with them in the darkness, too.

His head is between his knees and his shoulder rise up and down faster than a resting breathing rate should be. He hiccups and she knows he is crying now. She really is not good at comforting people. She slides down from the table and sits beside him on the floor. Not touching, but letting her heat into his space so he can remember she is here for him and he is here for her. After all, what type of friend starts cleaning after a disaster before you have the chance to ask?

She swallows. Her throat is dry. "Remember Donna?"

He keeps crying, but his head nods.

"Well, she...Monty, she was pregnant. She was getting ready to make the choice as to whether or not she wanted to keep the baby."

His crying becomes louder. "Why is this happening to us? Why couldn't it have just been meadows and flowers and swimming in rivers?"

Clarke says nothing after that, just pulls him towards her, chin on each other's shoulders. Soon, she cries too. Hiccuping breaths and a running nose. No tears, but she cries in her own way.

"Are you going to let Murphy stay with us?" They have not let go of each other. The warmth of one another reminding them they are not alone (and that _winter is coming_).

"Everyone hates him. He has no allies here," she says. Is she trying to justify her wishes? (Yes.)

"That's what worries me." Monty pulls back so he's looking at her. "Think about what Raven did. She's the youngest zero gravity mechanic. The most intelligent person here and yet she was desperate. Who would be next? What will be next?"

She licks her lips. "Let me know if you hear anything, okay?"

He nods. "I'll get more moonshine." He leaves the drop ship with a running nose and red eyes, but no tears.

Half the floor is clean and Clarke can't make up her mind whether she wants to help Monty finish it or get started on dousing the blankets and mattresses so that people can have something to fend off the chilly night with. She decides on the latter, but finds the pile rifled through and half of it gone.

She scoffs, cursing the delinquents scavenging ways. They could get sick all over again! Loud banging comes from the far left of camp. She knows Nori began construction on the tunnel systems in hope to use them as places of storage and living, but she did not realize they began digging already. Before Benard left, Nori and he sketched out the area of the camp estimating where the previous tunnels systems were located. She is impressed by his enthusiasm for this project as well as frustrated that she was not alerted the project was already under way. It meant people with blisters and she needs ground bark and type of moss that tends to be sparse in these Virginian woods. And cuts and complaints and she did not think she could handle all of that with her medical bay stinking like sweat, blood, and grief.

As annoyed as she is, she goes to get a status update. She cannot get angry or yell. Who was she to get angry towards a person who already wanted to better the conditions of the hundred? Besides, if no one needs her attention, maybe she will pick up a shift. The idea of straining her body so the clenching of her heart is buried in that exhaustion has her walking faster.

The digging sounds different. It is more like a wet slap which does not make sense because it has not rained in several days. It feels damp today, but Clarke suspects that the nature of cold here, unlike on the Ark where people would get nosebleeds due to dryness of the recycled, stale air. She sees movement between the tents that looks less like the downward motion necessary to press a spade into the earth and more like the horizontal swing of a baseball bat in the world series reruns Clarke would sometimes watch with her father, taking a break from soccer to enjoy a game with a slower pace.

Bellamy and Octavia sit on a log together, a blanket spread across their laps. Their fingers pulling at the fabric and bringing it together. They are sewing. A sliver of bone pinched between their fingers as they use repurposed thread from a rag passed its use. Behind them Monroe is the one taking a stick to a mattress, pounding it out as it leans against a tree for support. Jordan struggles with a wet blanket as he tries to draped it over wooden supports to dry. The wind blows and she smells the dark, bitter rot of leaves, but the stench of alcohol is as concentrated here as it was inside the drop ship.

Bellamy and Octavia smile. Monroe relinquishes the stick to Clarke so she can give another mattress a few good whacks. Together, they carry the mattresses back to the drop ship and struggle to squeeze them onto the second floor where they were before. The blankets are returned to who they were borrowed from with neat stitches as dark as the stains on them so no one notices. The piles outside the drop ship diminishes and the next day, anything soaked in alcohol dried in the consistent breeze that rustles branches and brings leaves to the ground.

As Clarke watches the sun rise that morning, she realizes fall ended yesterday and now, with only the tall evergreens and pines coloring the forest, winter is here. She rubs her hands together. She did not sleep too well last night because people continued to trail into the drop ship because their tents didn't afford the same protection as the steel walls did.

Urgency curls in her gut and she feels as if she needs to run from something even though she stands not but ten feet from the drop ship entrance trying to boast coals from last night into a more substantial fire. Myles, a boy with large cheeks and a larger smile, stumbles back from guard duty on the wall. He rubs he eyes until he sees Clarke in the dawn light and his back and shoulder straighten back.

"Ma'am, er, Clarke. Um, Good morning," he says.

She thinks he wants to salute, but is grateful he does no such thing.

"Morning. How was your shift?"

He shrugs. "Fine. Quiet. It's something I still gotta get used to."

Clarke frowns. "I thought you've been taking guard duty since we landed."

"Oh, yeah, but." He scratches at his ear. "I mean, the quiet. I have yet to get used to that. There is no humming of the Ark here."

"Ah." She pokes around the coals. "Do you—" She looks up at him. Myles tries to hold her gaze, but fails and instead looks at her boots or shoulder or breasts. She pushes on, "What was your impression of Indra and her group?"

One side of his mouth twitches up and the other twitches down. "The grounders? I mean, fine, as grounders go. I kinda expected them to be...I dunno, like my parents or something." He yawns.

Clarke smirks. "Go get some rest, I'll see you later."

"Really? I mean, yeah, okay, sounds good. I'll see you around Princess—"

She winces.

"I mean, Clarke, sorry, Clarke. I'll, yeah, see you." He jogs into the drop ship to wake whoever is stuck with the next round.

She stands, twirling the stick she used to revive the fire. One end is bright and glowing orange. The fire flickers up at random intervals as wind brings more oxygen into it. She agrees with Myles, though. They did not treat her like the adults on the Ark have during their sporadic radio conferences.

_But that won't happen anymore will it?_

She brings a hand up to her hair. Her mother. She breaths fast and exhales slow. _Control it. Control it. Control it. _She crouches and drops the stick into the fire. Her hands hover above the heat. If she brings them lower, will she becomes warmer? Will it help relax the tension of her lower back or the pressure of her lungs? Because it should not be this hard to breathe. Her fingers brush a burst of flames as the stick catches, but she snatches them back.

What was she about to do? Burn herself? Bury her hands in coals and grip them until she feels something other than whatever she is feeling? How could she do that? To the hundred? To herself? Her hands might be the last thing people feel before they die, but they also piece back together bones and skin. She always hated a reoccurring wart that tended to develop on the pinky edge of her finger, but how could she even cause harm to _that?_

The wind shifts. She turns. Bellamy is right behind her, hands full of kindling and more wood. The knuckles on his left hands have scabbed. When he punched Murphy when he was first discovered, his skin caught on the rugged edges of the exiled hundred's teeth. He drops the wood beside her and walks away. She saw him bare his teeth and his anger is as hot as the fire on her hands.

She pulls at the loose pieces of bark, dangling them above the fire. They would catch at some point and she holds on until the fire gets too close to her skin and she drops it. She repeats the process. Morning whispers rise.

"That looks fun."

She drops more kindling into the fire.

"You can do the rest," she tells Murphy. He is on the opposite side of the fire. His face will be scarred. Clarke can't fix that (or is it she won't?).

"That I can," he says. His voice is high like a mocking blue-jay. She tries not to look over her shoulder at him as she moves back into the drop ship to collect materials for a day pack. She needs to get out of this place.

Miller catches her at the gate. It takes at least two people to move it and she cannot do it on her own, but he crosses his arms and shakes his head and says, "Hell no."

* * *

Bellamy finds them glaring at each other. Neither willing to explain their reasoning while not caring about the motivation behind their actions.

"Clarke, you're the one that purposed the three person tag teams," he reminds her, dismissing Miller to do rounds inside the camp and filling in where need be.

She purses her lips and says, "Are you endorsing the rules here? I figured you'd be thrilled to know you've corrupted me."

He rolls his eyes. He keeps glancing at her fingers curled around the straps of her pack. He harbors anger from this morning. Maybe if she was not so physically weak from the sickness and mentally distraught (_because she had forgotten about her mother_) she would have understood his anger.

"Can you wait a half hour?"

The empty branches sway. Green moss crawling over the trees is hidden by desiccating leaves, their color seeping away into winter. "I'll wait."

And she does, her hand on the doors. Ron helps pull them back. Here on earth he does not have to duck through door ways not built for a man his height or worry that his forehead will hit the bunk above him when in the sky box.

It takes longer and it is because Bellamy and Finn stand toe to toe. "You do this or I'll ask Ricky. Trust me, you're not as good as you might think you are and that's not why I asked you to come."

Everyone knows that it is for her. She wants to inform Bellamy that this kindness is misplaced that perhaps it would be better if Ricky guided them to the crash site instead, but she rather just get going. While Ricky is as good as Finn is, he is not as confident and has the tendency to stay silent instead of pointing scavenging or hunting parties in the correct direction. Clarke understands the fear of imperfection. Finn can make decisions—well, those not having to do with relationships.

Finn pushes forward and heads west. The crash site is not far north enough to have reached Mount Weather, which is a relief because that might mean the supplies buried under that mountain are still a viable option now that they have outlined a truce with the grounders, but who knows how long that will last?

* * *

The weather holds as their group of seven trail through the forest. The sun is out and helps defrost some of the chill on her face. Connor, Murphy, and Ron came along as support. Bellamy does not look into her eyes when he talks about salvaging some materials. She agrees it is a good idea. Sturdy metal, even if blackened with fire and death, could be beneficial for building materials. Murphy does not say a thing.

Raven and Finn walk side by side, comments passing between them at a leisurely pace. They move in and out of each other space with years of knowing one another. It had nothing to do with their romantic status. Clarke knows this because Wells and she used to be the same way. Raven lifts her chin whenever Clarke addresses her but it is becoming less and less of a threat and more and more of a greeting, a way to bring Clarke in.

Connor and Ron entertain themselves by quizzing each other on old American Football stats. Apparently that is how they both used their time on the Archives.

"You draw?"

Clarke looks up from her feet. Raven stands still. _Walk and talk,_ Clarke thinks, but does not say so.

"It's useful to accurately document plants," she says, taking a sip out of her canteen to use this reprieve for something more than chatting.

Raven lifts an eyebrow. "No, I mean, for fun. Finn says you drew in the sky box. Maybe you can do something in the drop ship? Liven that place up a bit."

Clarke purses her lips. "I don't really have time for that. Maybe during the winter or something. Come on, let's keep going."

Ron groans, but picks up his feet. Bellamy does not comment on the sketches he has seen of the hundred and their faces along the margins of the medical journal she keeps that documents everything from those who came with a splinter to those with broken bones or girls who ask for recommendations on how much Queen Anne's lace they need to drink.

(Most of them complain that it is nasty and they want another alternative. So she tells them about their Plan B and the girls just go away grumbling about the need for better options. Clarke hates them for this because they need clothes and shelter and food before they need a tastier contraceptive.)

Murphy's shoes squelch as he walks because he slipped on a rock when crossing a shallow stream. Clarke is grateful she did not have to check for any wounds. She does not think she could touch him with out her hands shaking.

Winter's sterilizing cold fails to keep out the smell of ash. Tree fell over from the resulting blast of the crash, sides marked black. If anything, it makes the last half mile of the walk manageable because everything 's leveled out. Animals scamper away with their approach, no one tries to kill them because they are all thinking _what were they eating _even though they know that answer.

"Okay," Bellamy begins, stopping everyone before they enter the graveyard of massive twisted metal and smoldering coal. "This is to mark out anything useful so we can come back with a stronger force to collect materials to use back at camp. You want to take something back now, you have to do it yourself. Ron and Conner, scope out this third of the site. Finn and Raven, take to the northern part." He jerks his head at Murphy. "Take him with you and have him scope out the central area and anything else you don't feel like doing."

"I'm right here," Murphy grumbles. Finn frowns, not appreciating the additional work Murphy has to do. It was not something verbally talked about in camp, but he ended up with the worst jobs or at least with longer shifts. Sometimes fights break out between him and some others. Bellamy stands there and watches, only intervening when too many people become involved.

"Clarke and I will fill in the missing spaces." He gestures to them both. "We're only here for two or three hours before making it back to camp, so use is wisely."

Everyone moves off in their own directions. Gasps and gagging occur for the duration of the scavenging as more bodies than useful materials are stumbled upon. None of the bodies are complete so it's more common to come across an extremity than anything else. But Clarke rather see hundreds of blacken, unidentifiable skeletons than a leg or severed head.

Intact hands are the worst. She finds herself wondering if that gold ring melted onto the finger was the one that belonged to her father's mother and has been passed through the Griffin's family since the escape into space. Some fingers, those slender enough to be surgeons fingers, make her tuck her own hands away because she cannot stand to even look at her own. (Her dad's were clunky and thick, shorter. Clarke inherited not just her mother's profession on the Ark as it goes for many, but the steady hands and dexterous fingers meant for swift stitches and successful surgeries.)

She flinches back from an acrid smell of pink fluid dripping down from a warped container.

"Raven!" she calls, waving for the mechanics attention and receiving everyone's attention, instead. Bellamy walks with his eyes to the trees rather to the ground. His gun is at his hip. From this distance she cannot tell if the safety is off, but she knows the gun is not pointed to the trees like his eyes are. The muzzle faces the meandering figure of Murphy. Raven jogs to meet her. She prefaces by saying, "I think I found something, but I am not entirely sure what it is."

Raven's eye widen when the smell hits her. "Clarke, get back. Slowly."

She does as ordered, confused how pink goop is the cause of so much alarm.

Raven creeps closer. Nodding as she sees something different than Clarke due to their separate educational tracks followed on the Ark.

"What is it?" she asks as the mechanic dips a fragment of the destroyed ship into the plasma.

Raven grins at her before shouting, "Fire in the hole!" and throwing the coated object away. Clarke wishes Raven resisted the desire to show instead of tell. The combustion following the objects impact makes Clarke want to leave.

"We need to take this back with us. If I can stabilize it appropriately it, I might be able to harness the..." Raven's talk drones into technicalities that Clarke can't follow (and she suspects not many other's in Raven's field could either).

"What is it for, Raven?" Bellamy asks. He stands several paces from Clarke. Finn rocks on his toes, ready to sprint forward. _Always the hero_, she thinks. _But it would be too late. _She watches as Raven coaxes the jet fuel into a glass jar they were suppose to fill with seaweed. _I would be dead before he moved_. Or at least, she hoped she would. She has no desire to suffer with untreatable burns and agony of melted muscles and tissues. But Bellamy would do what he needs to do if such a situation arose.

Right?

They are not sure which direction the first bullet comes from but it is Murphy that calls out the warning before several other follow from the North side of the forest. The gun shot is nothing like the bellowing of the semiautomatics dug out from the depths of the fallout shelter. It almost sounds like a sigh, followed by an intake of breath sucked in between clenched teeth. It is the sound the bullets make when they hit the charred metal that convinces her that Murphy is not manipulating them into a panic.

"Pull back!" Bellamy shouts, he pushes Clarke ahead of him to where they entered the crash site. Finn cannot convince Raven to put down the jet fuel and so they duck between meager places of protection to make sure not to jostle the volatile substance too much. "Pull back!"

They keep moving until they collect alongside a large chunk of the engines, but really it is not nearly large enough for seven people and the way is curves over them presses them into the ashy ground. But it is the last structure before a fifty meter stretch flattened by the blast to the bones of uprooted and twisted trees. Ten shots in all are fired from the North East sector and it has been at least five minutes since the last one.

Is it safe to try? Is it worth the risk?

"We wait until it's dark," Bellamy says.

"We could get lost," Finn hisses. He is the closest to the forest. Murphy balances between him and Raven, who looks like she just wants to push him out into the line of fire to test the theory whether or not the shooters are still there.

"Well, that's what you're here for isn't, Spacewalker?"

Ron is not sure what to do with his arms and legs. He keeps elbowing Clarke in the ribs and Bellamy pushes against her so she looses her balance and the only gun they brought with them is wedged between her back and his chest. She wants to tell him to stop pushing because there is no where else to go.

"Yeah, but—"

"Leave if you want. More room for us."

Despite her tense relationship with Finn, she catches his eyes. He scoffs and slumps back against the wall of the engine. Bellamy's knee is against her thigh and he keeps _pushing_.

"Clarke, I'm sorry. I need to, well..."

"Do what you need to do," she assures him. She saw how much covering the engine afforded him. The shooters have a clear line of fire to his kidneys. "Do you think they're repositioning themselves to get a shot?"

Bellamy pulls the gun out from between their bodies and tucks his knees against her so that she is walled between the cold metal and the heat of Bellamy. She holds on to his thigh so she doesn't tip into him. "That's what I would do," he replies.

And they don't move. Raven complains she has to go the bathroom, but Bellamy tells her to hold it. "Unless you wanna be the bait," he adds. His legs quiver from the strain of crouching. Clarke feels each tremor. It would be easier if he just sat down, but with how the space has been allocated he would only make himself more vulnerable to whoever else has guns.

"Who do you think it is?" she asks. Ron raises an eyebrow but gets the hint that the question was not for him. He goes back trying to adjust his limbs to fit in a way that didn't result in him jabbing Connor and Clarke. She appreciates the effort, but his fidgeting is almost worse then his elbow in her stomach.

Bellamy presses his lips together. His eyes stare at the gray ground. Does he see the same things she does?

"It can't be one of our own. These guns aren't meant for stealth," he says.

Connor splutters, "Well of course it ain't one of us!"

Clarke closes her eyes to block out his ignorance. _Of course it could be one of us_, she thinks. _It wouldn't be the first time we've tried to kill each other. _

"Not grounders," Clarke insists. Bellamy frowns. "We never gave them bullets. And if it's not one of us, then it can't be one of them because we gave them our guns."

"They could have always had their own," Raven chimes in. Finn sighs, disappointed.

"No," Bellamy hums, rubbing his chin as he thinks. "They would have never accepted our terms if they did not think the guns were valuable. Besides, why didn't they use them before now?"

Ron stomach growls. "Man, I just don't care about this type of shit." He leans over his stomach as if compressing it will trick it into thinking it was recently fed. "When can we get back—" His head explodes. Brain and blood. His body hangs for a moment before collapsing. She breathes in the smell of gun powder. Pieces of Ron's skull stretch open with the skin and hair pulling away.

She touches her forehead. A fragment slices across her face and creates a superficial cut. Blood dips down into her eye because of it. Her training reminds her that head wounds bleed more because the face is so vascular. She has no reason to worry. (She has many reasons to worry, though.)

The gun is live in Bellamy's hands. They wait for another shot. Murphy vomits on Raven's shoes. She swears so much that Clarke hisses at her to shut up. They can't hear anything over the noise she's making. But that is a lie because nothing would distract them from the drumming coming from the direction of Mount Weather.

"Move." The sun is not even setting and they begin running. Raven refuses to put down the jet fuel, but Bellamy does not let her be the last person. He is two strides behind her as they enter into the monochrome woods encircling the crash site. The drums do not match Clarke's heart beats. They are too consistent while hers are sporadic and forceful. She pulls Connor when he begins to slow. None of them are healthy enough for this. Not even Finn who did not get sick but ended up tending to those who needed it most of the time. Healing people and healing yourself are equally exhausting.

"Raven, we could really use a brilliant idea right about now," Clarke shouts.

"I'm thinking! I'm thinking! I'm—"

A horse races out in front of them. Finn stops, but Clarke veers to the left, avoiding the prospect of stopping. Another whinnies when she crashes into it as Connor steps on the back of her heels. There are two horsemen and neither of them have their weapons drawn. Bellamy has the gun up and Raven is ready to chuck the jet fuel even though disturbing it so much might hurt them as much as these grounders.

"Get on." Clarke recognizes the coal dark eyes. She pushes Connor towards the horse. He does not understand. He pushes against the animal who becomes agitated. Its hooves stomp over the earth and Clarke's shoe laces get caught under its heavy foot.

"Not him," Anya scoffs. "He's useless. Get on Clarke of the Sky People."

"Clarke, do it! Do it, Clarke!" Finn shouts, he is already on the back of the other grounder who does not look away from the drums. A grounder who is more concerned about drums than the people running from them adding a layer of hysteria Clarke has not felt since she stood in the crowd as they prepared to hang Murphy.

"Connor, get on." Clarke takes his hands and makes him clench the saddle. He falls down, gurgling in his blood that fills his throat. Anya flicks her dagger clean.

Bellamy does not know where to point his gun "He's useless," she repeats. "Get on."

Clarke steps away. "What's coming?" she asks instead.

Anya looks to her companion. He shouts in their language. It sounds like a warning or a threat and it might just be both.

Clarke turns to Raven. "You have an idea for the jet fuel?"

Her eye are still deep in their socks, exhausted by the blood loss and stress. But when she answers, "yes" there is no weakness in the way her spine holds straight.

"Then get on that damn horse and use it to protect our people," Clarke commands.

Anya raises the dagger again to slash down as Raven. "Don't you fucking dare, bitch," she challenges. Words stop the dagger and the stalling. Raven sits in front of Anya, cradling the jar of jet fuel against her stomach.

"Keep the drums to your left. They won't catch you if you do. Run until you hit the river, follow it downstream. Do not attempt to cross it. There are many traps on the opposite side. Someone will come to guide you," Anya instructs.

"And what if you consider us useless, huh?" Murphy challenges. "Just gonna leave us to die?"

She sneers. "No one deserves death by Reapers. Not even you, thief and traitor." They gallop away.

"Let's go," Bellamy hisses.

The drums echo from everywhere and Clarke begins to think that Anya sold them false information. How were they suppose to run with the drums to their left?

Murphy figures it out first. "This way."

Bellamy glances at Clarke and hands her the gun. "You remember how to use this?"

She nods.

"Make sure you do if you need to and—"

Clarke is knocked off her feet. Bellamy is shouting and her head reels. She sees black and brown and sneering faces and hears Bellamy's curses.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" She is being lifted and thrown. She can't breath because her lungs are pressed against the back of another horse. (The coarse silk of their hides are embedded in the memory of her fingers.)

Then, she is moving and bobbing and she thinks she is going to be sick with the motion. She passes out instead.

* * *

**Author: **Well, that was a wild ride. Can I please just tell you how important Anya's character is to me? I think her character foreshadows who Clarke might become and killing Conner, who is deemed 'useless', is an example of how Clarke must differentiate herself from the brutal thinking that many of the grounders in the shown seem to have.

I think I should let you all know that I worked on this story for NaNoWriMo so I have 50,000 words of 100 goodness to deliver to you after significant revision. So, you know what's super important during this time of revising? **Reviews_._**I wish I knew what you were thinking as you read, but I don't and reviews are the only way I can access your thoughts. Or Pms. So humor me and drop a note~**  
**

Enjoy this week's episode and continue to spread the word!


	8. Chapter Eight

**Note:** Remember to vote on online polls and let the producers of the 100 know that this show deserves a third season!

* * *

**The Person (I should have been)  
Chapter Eight**

"How much is there left in you after you have lost everything outside of yourself?"  
Orison Swett Marden

* * *

He does not know how they made it back to camp. They lost their only gun when Clarke was abducted. Despite mistrust, they follow Anya's instructions and keep the drums to their left, but no one comes to get them at the river bank like promised. They followed it all night. Bellamy refused to stop for two reasons. One: he needed to regroup at the camp. Two: no way in hell was he going to get sleep as John Murphy as his guard anyways.

A search party finds them. Monroe leads it. Bellamy chews on the jerky she gave him as they head back to camp.

"Raven was deposited roughly five meters outside the gate in the night. None of the guards heard or saw anything until she started making a racket," Monroe supplies, adjusting the grip on her spear.

"No sign of Clarke or Finn." He isn't asking.

She nods her head in confirmation. He doesn't need it.

Bellamy does not understand how the guards missed a horse galloping up to their doorstep, but he needs a nap before they begin any actual planning. Octavia has to fetch her boyfriend because as much as Bellamy wants to smoke the grounders out of the forest, he needs information:

Who has access to sophisticated weapons like the one's they encountered at the crash site?

What tribe did they encounter and why were they not a part of the armistice?

Where were Clarke and Finn taken? (He doesn't give a shit about the why. Either way, he is going to disagree with the reasoning.)

How can they get them back?

Also, what's Raven's plans for her precious chemical? He wants to blow something up and he is sure she does, too, but they can't do that. Too many risks are involved.

Miller greets them at the gate and Bellamy divvies up the tasks. He goes to the drop ship with the intention of climbing to the third floor to sleep. The air is not as fresh and clean, but it is as quiet as the Ark and he could use a moment where mayhem is not pounding into his ears. Except he makes it three rungs up the ladder and his legs shake so much that he looses his footing and drops back down to the floor, wobbling with the slight impact. He ends up sleeping on Clarke's bed or dining table or operation table or what ever it needs to be. He needs Clarke to be sleeping here instead of him.

He sleeps for twenty minutes before jolting awake. No one is in the drop ship with him and the camp is quiet and concerned. Were they not just at peace with the grounders? So what is happening? Where is Finn and Clarke? Did Bellamy and Clarke make a mistake and believed the grounders would honor the agreement? Maybe he is the only one thinking that. He flips through Clarke's field guide as he waits for Lincoln to arrive. He remembers that they were supposed to collect a few items she identified as paramount to her healing practices. They never did get around to it. He takes times to learn two of the plants she has sketched out. She labels them as common, but both are useful in medicinal healing and cooking.

"Where's Octavia?" Bellamy asks when Lincoln enters.

"She's making preparations to leave."

Bellamy nods. He sits on the table, balanced so one leg dangles and the other is rooted to the ground. He clasps his hands together as something to hold on to. "So you want to explain to me what the hell is going on? We get shot at and then your leader comes in and happens to kill one of the two men who are now dead in the woods probably getting torn apart by scavengers." His leg shakes and if he was the pacing type of person he would, but he is not so he squares his shoulders off to Lincoln.

"She's not my leader," Lincoln clarifies. "But she does have more power than Indra who is the one I answer to." His fingers open and close as he explains. "The dynamics here are different than what Octavia has explained to me on your Ark. There is no central leader and no central rules. The Commander we choose to follow based on their merits."

Bellamy scoffs, "Great." They made a deal with one grounder only to find out that they had no actual power to enforce the truce.

"Anya makes practical choices and follows them through. She killed your man, but she did it in attempts to save Clarke." Lincoln face is passive.

Bellamy runs a hand through his hair, pulling at it to help keep him alert. "You're telling me that her life is worth more than Connor's then?" It like the Ark all over again.

Lincoln frowns. He sees the moral dilemma. "That's what Anya believes. And it is something that one must consider here."

Bellamy knows because he is the one who makes sure Clarke is always in front of him and that even if the hunters come back with meager bounty she still eats instead of handing it off to someone else. He knows, but it makes him sick to remember the truth.

He moves on to other questions. "Where are Clarke and Finn being held?"

"Most likely at the White House."

"You can't be serious." The expression on Lincoln's face does not change. Bellamy guesses their understanding of what the White House was is different. "Okay, fine. Why would Anya bring them back to her village?" He crosses his arms on his chest.

"Her second in command was recently caught in a crossfire with the Mountain Men. It is possible that she came to seek out your healers expertise when her own failed to have an effect on Tris' injuries. When Anya found you to be gone from camp, she most likely set out on horseback to collect Clarke." Lincoln glances behind him at the exit of the drop ship. Bellamy presses his knuckles against the metal table. Less than two weeks ago Finn lay there convulsing and _who they are and who they need to be to survive are very different things. _That is what Bellamy told Clarke then and that he is what he told himself. He just needs to believe it.

"It was lucky that she intercepted you when she did," Lincoln adds.

Bellamy chokes. "Lucky? She killed one of our men."

"As you said, but when it comes to her people Anya is pragmatic to the core. Raven would not be alive if Anya did not see her as useful. Tristan does not see things in such ways. He would have probably killed everyone."

"Are you trying to reassure me?" A headache presses behind Bellamy's eyes.

Lincoln shrugs. "I am telling you what you need to know."

"Ready?" Octavia says, a machete in hand. It jars Bellamy. His sister should not have to wield it, but none of them should have to carry guns on their shoulders or knives in their pockets.

Lincoln nod and takes the proffered satchel. They leave. Bellamy stays. He picks up the field journal and does not open it. He admires the cracked leather and how the edges of the papers smooth together like clean, dry hair.

"Bellamy, what are you doing?" His sister stands somewhere behind him at the entrance. "We need to go get Clarke. I think Monty and Jasper are about to loose it."

"I can't," he sighs.

"What do you mean you can't." It rushes out in one breath. She is not asking and she does not believe him. (Does he believe it himself?)

"Octavia," he explains, "I can't just leave them again. Miller and Monroe can only do so much. I have to make sure that these kids keep working and don't fall apart. We have to keep moving."

"Bullshit." He looks back at his sister. Her body is angled forward like she is ready to tackle him. "If you want to go look for her, then just admit it. I get it. We're the crazy kids that chose you and Clarke as our leaders and you've gotta take care of us, but you're missing your other half, big bro. Don't pretend that you don't want to be out there, too." Her breathes are harsh inhales and exhales pushed between clenched teeth. Bellamy's breathes quieter, but it still comes in fast, shallow intakes. Octavia can see the rise and fall of his chest and how he bows his head.

Of course that is what he wants to do, but leaving the delinquents to hash it out themselves every time something happens to Clarke is not apart of his duties as leader. It is to continue forward despite the weight in his stomach. "Go find them, Octavia, and bring them home."

His sister leaves, shouting out orders. He grips the journal and succumbs to a moment of panic. Then, he searches out Raven to get an update on just what she plans to do with that jelly she insisted on bring back from the crash site. After all, it's the thing that Clarke gave up her seat on Anya's horse for.

* * *

Raven and he eat something handed to them by Harper and Bellamy can't taste it. Being outside with the cold wind and the hot fire helps him remain awake.

"Think defensive," he emphasizes. Already he had to temper her plans for land mines and bombs even though it was tempting, but truth be told those types of weapons were too dangerous to have around the hundred. People always came to Clarke with cuts on their hands from sloppy work with a knife. Three people already lost tops of fingers because they were not paying attention when working with hatchets. If they had land mines he doesn't doubt that someone would be clumsy enough to set one off.

Raven drums her fingers against her knees. "I might be able to redistribute it so it is a long burning flame. Might be useful to have in the winter to reserve on wood supply."

"Shit." Bellamy runs a hand through his hair.

Several people stop to stare, murmuring, "What's wrong?"

Bellamy tells them to keep working, dammit. They scamper away.

"Dude," Raven says, looking at him like she is not sure what to do with him.

"Wood," Bellamy explains, but apparently it is not enough. "We haven't been stockpiling wood! Nori didn't include ventilation in his blue prints, either." He stands, setting down the stained mess kit on the ground. "I need to talk to Nori."

"Wait, Bellamy!" Raven calls after him, but he ignores her.

Nori continues to assure Bellamy it isn't a problem to insert ventilation shafts into his design, but can Bellamy really trust this kid who did not finish his education to do this? So he quizzes and questions. Nori steps away and tries to evade the pressure Bellamy bears down. He steps in closer, not minding breaking into someone's personal space to get the responses necessary.

A gunshot saves Nori from further interrogation. Bellamy crouches and looks passed the wall into the trees, thinking it came from afar. Yelling and cheering reminds him danger is inside the walls as much as it is outside.

Murphy and Drew wrestle each other. Murphy is winning, but Drew got in the first punch to Murphy's nose so it drips blood over them both. Bellamy finds the discarded gun forgotten at the feet of the crowd. Everyone is too focused on the fight to care about the gun. It would grant too quick of a death and they want a show.

Bellamy has to waste a bullet to get the crowd to back off. The empty shell drops from the chamber of the gun and rolls down from his shoulder to the compacted dirt. He killed someone with a casing like that. (Dax, his name was Dax, and he beat a man to death because he stole his rations.)

"Get it together," Bellamy shouts. Drew punches Murphy again. "Enough!" He muscles between the two, frustrated he had to repeat himself. "You wanna know how many bullets we have now?" He is talking to the crowd, frustrated by their self defeating ways. Do they not realize he is trying to keep them alive? You would think that they would not try to work so hard against this endeavor. "A hundred and forty two. That's it."

He notices Jordan at the forefront of the crowd. He is twelve with light blond hair and a face screwed into angles of hate. Bellamy tries to catch the eyes of everyone in the crowd, but many of them avoid him by looking down or away. "They're reserved for emergencies and hunting large animals, that's it. Now, there is meat to cure, repairs to be made and tunnels to be dug." The chirping of birds is the loudest thing in the camp. "So what the hell are you all doing just standing around?"

People get moving. A few pass by Murphy and greet him with spit or threats. Drew turns to leave. Bellamy yanks him back. "Oh, no, you're not going anywhere, either. Jasper," Bellamy calls out.

Jasper's goggles are shoved up onto his head. He must have just come from the distillery where he is working on developing gunpowder. His last batch did not provide the power necessary to fire a bullet, but the next one was promising. Or so he said.

"Yeah, boss?"

Bellamy shoves the gun in his hands. He rather have Miller or Monroe do it, but Miller is sleeping and Monroe went with Octavia and Lincoln. "Escort these idiots to the drop ship. Stay with them, I'll be right there." He moves away.

"Wait, where are you going?" Jasper calls.

Bellamy stops. He was going to talk to Clarke, but he can't do that now, can he? So who does he talk to that knows the intricacies of camp? He walks away with out explaining. He ends up taking his time taking a piss in the woods before walking back into camp with a straighter spine and an aching back from holding it in place. He will not let it down, though.

Nori stops to ask his opinion about the air shafts. "Figure it out. You're the architect," Bellamy hisses. He keeps people from killing each other. That is his job. Why do they think that it some how encompasses more? (Maybe because he did, but right now he can't be that person.)

Jasper stands between Drew and Murphy with the gun in his hands and the safety off. Bellamy rips it away and flicks the safety on. "We don't shoot each other," he says. "We don't waste bullets on that."

Murphy says, "No, mercy killing aren't your style are they, Bellamy?"

Bellamy stares at Clarke's journal he left out. "Drew, you're on latrine duty."

"What?" Drew is like Jasper with sharp angles and deep hollows, but he is the taller of the two. He has a good eye in foraging even though he was training to be a grease monkey on the Ark.

"You need instructions, ask Murphy," Bellamy growls. Jasper frowns, confused. Was it not Murphy's fault? Should he not be the one being punished? But no one understand what it means to lead so how can Bellamy even begin to explain it all? "Jasper," he continues, "Go work on that gunpowder. Raven could use some."

The drop ship empties. He can't hear his own breath. "I want you to tell me about the grounders."

Murphy leans against a wall, arms crossed. "What, you plan on storming the village or something to get your girl back?"

Bellamy picks up the journal and flips to a section Clarke has not filled. The pencil he pulls out of an empty tin can has a dull tip. It will do.

"I want you to tell me everything they said to you. I want you to tell me about this Tristan guy and the type of power dynamics he had with Anya. And if you know about the commander. I want you to tell me about these people who tear out your fingernails and then shove splinters into the raw skin," Bellamy says. He leans against the metal operation table, pencil ready.

Murphy grins. "Yeah, you would want to know how to do that type of shit, wouldn't you?"

"I wanna know who I'm dealing with and whether I can trust them or not." He writes down _Day 44_ in small blocked lettering at the corner of the page. "What type of power does this Tristan guy hold over Anya. Is he more powerful? Is he the Commander?"

Murphy stares at him with flat eyes and blood still coming down from a broken nose. "Leader, no. He wasn't the leader, but he had enough respect and influence that no one was going to question what he did behind closed doors."

Bellamy sketches a note out and raises an eyebrow to tell Murphy to continue. The interview lasted more than a hour and Bellamy isn't sure how much of John Murphy's claims he can believe. Most of the things he writes down he does not understand. Mountain men? Reapers? Who were they? He doesn't interrupt though, he has Murphy talk until he starts repeating himself. Lincoln failed to explain the most pertinent things, it seems. Tracing his fingers over what he wrote he tells Murphy to go work in the smoke house.

"No latrine for me?"

Bellamy raises an eyebrow. "I need to make sure you're not covered in shit if you're going to be handling the meat that will last us through the winter."

"How thoughtful." Murphy eyes are sunken in and he remembers that both of them walked all night only to arrive in the morning in a place where no one was sure what they were suppose to be working on, fights continued to break out, and where there is no Clarke. Bellamy doesn't feel pity.

"Goes with being a leader," he murmurs. He flips to a black page to only find portraits of the dead. Some are more detailed than others. Wells face is outlined in deep, black lines. The flyaways of Charlotte's hair looks like a fuzzy trick of the light around her head. Not all of them are happy or smiling or blank. Many are creased in anger of lives ripped away or despairing at what might have been. He closes the book.

_Half a leader,_ he thinks. Murphy should have left, but in reality he still leans against the wall, arms crossed and eyes at half mast. Bellamy hates the shadows his brow casts over his eyes. It makes him hard to read.

"Go do something useful," he growls.

* * *

Jasper finds Bellamy in the evening, a cup of food in one hand and a grin on his face. "We have a surprise." The fire fills his face, lighting it up. Should Bellamy mention how much he hates surprises? But how could he tell this to Jasper who bounces as he walks and whose shoulders were not pull in as tight around his chest as they normally were? He follows behind instead, shoving down the food Jasper brought him.

Raven fingers are bleeding when she holds out the three pair of radios to him. Vanessa slouches in a chair, frowning. "Sure took your time getting here didn't you?" she says, not moving. Her hair that was once as smooth as Ravens frizzed out so much that she began rollings it into thin dreads to make it more manageable.

"We can't set them to a frequency. We don't have access to those types of materials, but we can talk to each other." Jasper takes a radio from Raven and shoves it at Bellamy. "Let's try them out!"

He does not have time for this, but he doesn't hand it back. He flips a switch and plays with at lever that controls the volume. Vanessa blabbers about trying to find enough copper wire and the like. She was arrested and put in the sky box because she had a tendency to scavenge through private homes. Of course Jasper and Raven would ask for her help.

"Distribute them between the guards," he instructs, putting one at his waist and turning to leave.

"Wait. You're not even going to test them?" Jasper's voice wobbles between confusion and excitement.

Bellamy says, "I'll take your word that they work."

* * *

Octavia, Lincoln, Ricky, and Monroe are back that morning with Finn between them on a stretcher. Bellamy doesn't see blood so what the hell justifies having his ass in a stretcher?

"Where's Clarke?" Monty asks, following the group towards the drop ship. He looks back out passed the open gate, expecting to see her come running through.

"She stayed," Octavia grunts stumbling over uneven ground. Drew jumps forward to replace her position. Vanessa relieves Monroe. Miller takes Ricky's place. A breath passes before Jordan, who has not been able to smile since Evy's death to the virus, stands his twelve year old self next to Lincoln's two hundred pounds of survival instinct gathered over the last two decades. Even though Jordan strains to hold up his corner, no one complains and finish the walk to the drop ship.

Bellamy grabs his sister's arm. "Stayed?" He looks between the members of the group. Monroe's braids are coming undone. Ricky keeps blinking. "Are you suggesting that she chose to remain at the grounder camp?"

"I wouldn't say that." Monroe's sarcastic tone took a while for Bellamy to get used to, but it seems as if he is backsliding because he tenses his shoulder and frowns.

"Well then what the hell would you say?" He steps toward her. Monroe looks around as if to say, _wait, is he angry at me?_

"I-I mean, she just, well—"

Bellamy turns away looking to the others who were suppose to come back with two, conscious people and instead retrieved only one, _unconscious _Spacewalker. Ricky snuck away. Octavia is rolling her eyes and Lincoln looks bored.

"Can someone please explain to me why the hell Clarke is with the grounders instead of here with her people?" he growls.

"Calm down Bell," Octavia sighs, "She's going to be escorted back tomorrow afternoon. She stayed to help with a few patients and exchange some more information. Nyko is there with her if that makes you feel any better. A familiar face and all that." She waves off his concern.

"And why the hell is Finn knocked out on a stretcher?"

"Oh, Clarke sedated him. He was getting over defensive with the Anya's people. Said he was more of a hindrance than a help so she used some root or plant or another to put him under for a bit. I think she made it too strong by accident, though,'' his sister goes on to explain.

Clarke does not do anything like that by accident. She isn't reckless. Bellamy is curious of the reasoning, but not as much as he is pissed at her staying behind without anyone from the one hundred to be there for her.

Monty grumbles something about misplaced help and goes off to check on whatever he has been brewing. Bellamy has not seen Jasper or Raven since they gave him the radios. (Maybe when he is thinking clearer, he will come to conclusion that these were actually very handy and wonder the range on them. He will remember that he should thank them because they did not, in fact, have to make any of this.)

Bellamy has a hard time focusing on any one thing after that. He jumps between repairing the wall and digging down into the Earth. The ache of physical work makes him more tired, but instead of less critical and calm he becomes harsh and overbearing. At one point, he takes a squirrel from Evan's hands to finish skinning it, grumbling that he still has not learned anything. Ulric does not comment that Bellamy's finished product is almost as bad as Evan's would have been. Instead, Ulric tells Bellamy there is nothing left to skin but other squirrels are lined up for skinning. He leaves to find something else to occupy his time until Clarke comes back and he can lecture her about sticking together and not making rash decisions. It is not until he realizes that someone stole the blankets from his tent and finds himself in the drop ship that still smells like alcohol from its recent cleaning that he forgets about her. It is because he preoccupies himself with punishment worse than Murphy's to the delinquent who had the gall to steal his items.

* * *

**Author: **I decided if I was going to procrastinate with finals, I might as well update this baby. Writing Bellamy unraveling was a bit unnerving, but I hope it was expressed in an appropriate way.

Who's totally not ready for tonight's episode?!

As always, thanks for reviewing, following, and favoriting! Please continue to drop me a note ;) ya'll are the best.


	9. Chapter Nine

**Note: **I now use tumblr! Follow me beggershorses

* * *

**The Person (I should have been)****Chapter Nine**

"If you cannot find a good companion to walk with, walk alone, like an  
elephant roaming the jungle. It is better to be alone than to be with those  
who hinder your progress."  
Buddha

* * *

It's takes two days before Finn will talk to her. The first day she doesn't notice because she negotiates Bellamy's moods. He announces in front of the whole camp what she did was reckless and thoughtless. He doesn't say he is angry, but his jaw tight and shoulders stiff, he doesn't have to. Everyone stays clear of the drop ship while they debrief each other. They don't yell, but there are a lot of tense silences and scoffing.

"We need them to trust us, Bellamy. A lot of the people I met were angry that they were aligning with us because they see us as weak! And nothing to offer!" she defends over a cup of heated moonshine boiled with some spices that were a gift from Nyko. They moved to sit outside by the fire so that people could start settling down for sleep. The wind is chilly and fire light bright. They can't see the moon tonight.

Bellamy grinds his teeth and snaps. "We look to you, Princess, so don't go disappearing on a whim." He admits as they review progress on the tunnels and underground housing that he couldn't decide if he was pissed she drugged Finn or impressed. "Should I start worrying about you drugging me any time that I get a little too troublesome for you?" he jokes.

"Finn kept getting in the way," she whispers. Bellamy stops from taking a sip of his drink. His cup drops back down to his knee, letting it rest there. He doesn't interrupt and she continues, "It confused Anya and the others. She kept asking why he would speak for me. We can't risk any miscommunication."

"They need to know who the authority is," Bellamy finishes. His shoulders soften and he nods.

Clarke squeezes her hands around her cup. The moonshine is cooling and her nose is red, but she doesn't want to leave the fireside with the owls around them and most of the one hundred sleeping. She is happy to be back here. "Bellamy." She licks her lips."I know we don't always see eye to eye, but…"

"We do good together." He sips his drink and she smiles. "You know why?" he puts more wood on the fire.

Clarke scoots her feet closer to the ring of stones and laughs, "You're obviously excited to tell me why."

"We're predictable."

"Oh, that's a compliment?" She smiles when she says it. He doesn't have to explain. She understands. She knew he would be angry, but she also knew he would listen. He knew she would do what's best for their people, even if it wasn't the best thing for her.

He nudges her shoulder with his. "Don't let it get to your head."

Clarke finishes the last swallow of her moonshine and shakes the last droplets into the fire. The flames spark up in response but simmer down. She has no idea what Finn would do. Never really did. He was unpredictable in a way that excited her and now makes her nervous. He's good at surprises and here, who needs surprises? She needs Monty's reassuring calm. Raven's wit. Jasper's passion. Bellamy's passion. Miller's consistency. Monroe's sarcasm. Sterlings's laughter.

Finn's optimism and diplomacy shrinks. He looks straight forward and only forward, directed towards a target she can't see. He misses things because of it. Finn fails to acknowledge good propositions put forth by the more-morally-questionable of the one hundred. Like Ulric with his stoic face and firm demeanor who demanded some type of bathing facilities to be constructed.

Clarke liked the idea. Better hygiene meant less sickness. Bellamy liked the idea. Less sickness meant more healthy workers. They both liked it because it meant less complaining and grumbling. When she told Finn later that night as they shared dinner he talked about how people will have to make trips to get that type of freshwater and that it was impractical to waste their time bringing it back to camp when they could just go to the river and wash off.

"But don't you just want to take a warm bath? Even if you're just scrubbing yourself down with a rag, doesn't that sounds awesome?" She asked it with her eyes cast down, picking at broken bones that she sucked the marrow from.

Finn touched a wrist. She looked up. His lips were tilted more towards one side as was his head. It was like he was about to explain something so very simple to her.

"Clarke?" Bellamy calls her back.

She says, "Good night, Bellamy, I'll see you in the morning."

* * *

She does, but only for a few minutes because she gets fidgety. It's been a whole day without Finn, but she'll wait until he comes around. He was the one who admitted the love her harbors for her.

He told her as they leaned over Triss' spasming body. "Clarke, I love you, Clarke."

She told him to not hold the patient so tightly because they don't want to break any bones; not that it would matter because after a desperate—stupid—blood transfusion Triss would die anyways. Anya punched Clarke, but she still saw the tears. It's Nyko's son that took them to the hovel where they were being kept.

Finn repeated, "Clarke, I love you."

"I heard you the first time," she told him.

He looked confused as if he was about to tell her what she was supposed to say back, too.

"Here, the grounders gave me this, it should help diminish some of the pain of your sprain," she offered him some tea instead. It helped with the pain; she did not lie. She didn't tell him the other effects, though.

* * *

It's day two and she finds him. He sits outside of his tent, nose and cheeks red. The cold settled in today. With shaking knees everyone works with hands splitting from the dry air. Clarke does not know how to treat this, so she uses a paste of the seaweed to soothe it when the one hundred were not active. More and more people cuddle in the drop ship. If there were a hundred people, Clarke does not know how they would fit, but having sixty seven..that was manageable.

(Can she even think these things?)

(Yes.)

(_What we do to survive..._)

From her angle as she walks up to him, she can't see what he is working on. He is hunched over something and his left arm jerks as if it was caught on something before continuing through its motion.

He is carving.

He is carving a spear.

Since when did Finn consider carving a spear worthy of his time? She asks him, joking in a way to make the question seem more like a tease. He doesn't glance at her. He acknowledges her by saying, "It seems as if making weapons is the only valued thing around here."

He is referencing the grenades Vanessa engineered and then Raven tweaked and crafted into something more applicable ("Damn engineers," Raven said. Clarke thought Vanessa was going to dig her nails into Raven's face.). He is referencing the weak gunpowder collection Jasper and Monty are fostering in attempts to use it as a long burning fuel—but Finn only heard gunpowder and thought about the defunct bullets Raven could easily fill again and make them kill worthy.

"You know that's not true," Clarke says, tucking her hands into her arm pits and bouncing on her toes. Everything is cold cold cold.

Thankfully the ground has not frozen so Nori and others can continue their work into the tunnels. "If the weather holds for another week we'll have enough support beams in that people can move into the first space," Nori promised with his one eye that tended to drift to the right.

She saw the space and it's enough to hold fifteen sleeping people. Another room is being finished, but the construction slowed because as much metal and wood as they scavenge, there's still not enough materials to hold everything up and returning to the crash site was not an option at the moment. Nori doesn't like the idea of too many people going into the tunnels already, but Bellamy and she do not like the idea of production slowing because the drop ship may be able to hold enough people to sleep in for a night, it was no way to live and did not afford any insulation. Clarke associates winter with the smell of metal.

"Isn't it?" Finn shoots back, hunching farther over his project.

She doesn't think that he is implying what she thinks he is implying (so what is it that she thinks he is implying?) She never was good with passive aggressive acts. She sighs and asks, "Why are you sitting out here and doing it, then? I already have two people who are running fever and I do not need another one. You just got off the operating table, Finn. Take it easy."

"Oh, really? I thought this was the time to make reckless decisions."

"What the hell," she grumbles. Her ears hurt with the wind. She should have put on a hat. "You know why I sedated you. One less person there meant less leverage if this turned south, plus, it was me they wanted, not you. Finn, you're an asset to our people here because of your tacking abilities. The grounder's don't need what you have to offer though, you were most expendable in their terms. You know I was protecting you."

"I don't need protecting." He is not moving and he stares down at his spear. She can see the freckle at the base of his neck where his coat's collar fails to cover. She kissed that freckle once when they were in bed and with candles and his back towards her as he slept. She thought it was cute. She kinda still does. But she doesn't want to kiss it. She rubs a hand across her face. She damaged his ego, she acknowledges that. Maybe she should talk to Raven? Finn and she have known each other for so long that they must have had fights like these. Raven probably knows how to fix this. She was considered the third most intelligent mechanic on the Ark and with given more experience and time, she would have been the best and highest rank mechanic. Someone so smart like her has got to know how to fix these types of problems.

* * *

Turns out Raven doesn't know how to fix these human problems, only mechanical ones. "Finn was the one who always tried to make things work out. I just kinda went along with whatever he planned," she admits. Raven stands over the table working to repair a radio one of the guards dropped last night and stepped on because he couldn't find it in the dark. The tent is too cold for any productive work. Raven's fingers take a bit to get working. Clarke stares at her fingers as she continues to manipulate the wires.

"Have you noticed anything...different with him?" It is not a pleasant or good question, but Clarke doesn't do passive aggressive.

Raven doesn't move. Her shoulders touch her ears. "Are you really asking me that?" Clarke isn't sure if that is a question she is supposed to answer. Her hesitation is appropriate because Raven barrels on the next moment, "Of course I've noticed that he's different. He has a hard time getting comfortable at night and instead of ending up curled together my legs or arms are over him and he pushes them off mid into the night. He talks in the past instead of in the future. It's like he is stuck and does not know how to get out!" Raven is pacing at this point, her voice not loud enough to exit the tent. "I tried to help him, be there for him, but I deserve better than that."

"Yeah, you do," Clarke agrees. Raven levels her sharp eyes at her. Sometimes, the way Raven angles a look reminds Clarke of Anya with her round cheeks and slim eyes. She feels respect and awe in the presence of both women, though for different reasons.

"So you and him." Raven does some gestures with her hands.

Clarke shakes her head. "No."

Raven hums, nods.

"When we had sex, Raven," Clarke explains, finding herself sinking to the chair. "It was us versus the camp. Bellamy and I had not figured each other out yet and a huge blow out happened resulting in the death of my best friend and a young girl. And you know Murphy? I almost had him hung for a crime he did not commit."

"Well, I'm sure he deserved it for something he has done," Raven quips. Clarke appreciates how she is not pacing, it makes talking to her easier.

"And we had the bracelets that sent information back to the Ark of our vitals and they were all short circuited when we tried to convert them into Morse code devices. So to the Ark, we were dead and that meant no help, no hope, no future because at that point in time no way in hell weren't we able to get enough food for everyone let alone think about making it through the winter time." She clasps her hands between her thighs to keep them warm, but she does not think she is shaking from just the cold. The ground of the tent is soft because it is just warm enough not to freeze.

"And Finn freaked out and I couldn't have that happening because at the time he seemed like the only one who would be there when I needed him to be. Sex offered us both comfort and I needed it to be him more than someone else that wouldn't be there when it counted most. I needed the intimacy and I chose him." Why is she saying these things? She curls her toes inside of her boots. They have been taking hides and lining the boots, but Clarke knows it is a temporary fix. They need to learn how the pound leather and smooth it into useful shapes. She can't look at Raven.

"Do you regret it?" Her voice is low and threatening. Clarke did use her best friend after all.

"No," she admits, staring passed the crack in the tent flap. "No, I don't, but I don't want what he wants and I don't know how to negotiate with a party that is not interested in anything I have offered."

Raven scoffs. "No, Clarke you have plenty of practice of that with Bellamy and it works out." She licks her lips. The tent is silent. Winter wind brushes against Clarke's exposed ankles because her pants are too short. "But you're not just something that you can give away." She looks at Raven and Raven looks back, her face flushed because Raven doesn't do the whole exposing your soul—at least, not with Clarke and not ever before. "Not your body or your mind or your spirit. You can't give those away. Maybe share, but even then if you hand over too much that's just not right anyways," she finishes. Picking up the radio again she hands it to Clarke. "Give this to whoever is on rotation, will ya?"

She nods and stands, knowing when a conversation has ended. Clarke's hand grips the flap.

"But Clarke." She does not turn around as Raven continues, "You're right. Something is off with Finn and I don't think it's just love sick shit. And it's not just him. This whole camp seems to be holding its breath for something and it makes it hard for me to eat sometimes 'cause it makes me so anxious. We're supposed to be at peace with the grounders, but what the hell happened out there at the crash site? Why does it feel like we're still at war?"

Clarke asked Anya that very question and the grounder leader ignored it. It became apparent that none of the other grounders were going to say anything about it, too. Bellamy shared with her what he gathered from his interview with Lincoln and Murphy, but with Lincoln gone for several days to make some delivery to the Luna tribe, they haven't had the opportunities to ask more elaborate questions. Instead they accepted the lull and worked towards building their stores against the promise of winter. Maybe it distracted her, this busy work of drying herbs and preparing roots so that they are more effective and she did not notice how quiet the one hundred talk to each other or lean in closer or have a tendency to watch the walls. How could she have been so blinded by the relief of being inside the walls to forget that it was just as dangerous inside as it was outside. The walls are a promise. And promises can be broken, reformed, or abandoned.

* * *

Octavia leans over a coal pit arranged outside of the drop ship, rotating some roots and adjusting the height of herbs hanging over. They cannot dry to fast or they will go brittle and break. It is a slow, meticulous process. Clarke didn't expect Octavia to have the patience for it. (She's good for about two hours, but any more and she starts to get sloppy.)

"How's it coming?" Clarke asks. She needs small talk after her conversation with Raven that leaves her empty and unsure as if her stomach is empty but she's too nauseated to eat.

"Fine. When's someone gunna take over for me?" OCtavia asks.

"Marc will come over in a bit," she promises.

Octavia stutters in her movements. Some of the drier leaves shakes off their branches or stems and burn up in the coals. She does not apologize and says, "This is a good job for him."

Clarke agrees. Marc grew up with a congenital condition where he walks with a limp and the fingers of his left hand are fused together. He is not the only baby that is born on the Ark that has birth defects, but he was the only one out the hundred who stole drugs from the medbay seven times before getting caught. He swears he was trying to sell them to Nigel in exchange for something or another that he thought was important at the time. (Miller and him like to exchange tricks of their trade.)

Clarke began to pass off what knowledge she knows to Octavia and Marc so that if she is not around, someone else would be able to step in. But it's hard. Clarke grew up learning the bones and muscles and organs of the body. Her mother sang her silly songs about sicknesses that they learn in training school. They don't know things she expects people to intuitively understand. Sometimes she ends up having to mend someone rather then having her trainees do it. Octavia complains more than Marc that Clarke is a control freak.

On nights Clarke sleeps and she is waken because someone twist their ankle, she reminds herself that she needs their help. She scribbles down Monty's knowledge about plants and mushrooms because she may not remember it, but she will be able to look it up. Nyko's understanding of the native area is added to those notes. People expect her to fix their ailments and she acts like she can but she isn't sure how much farther she can lie to them and herself. Sometimes she wakes up to a owl and wishes that she was an owl. Or at least not human so that she could not understand this suffering and emptiness. But then she will fall back asleep and wake up in the morning, going at it all over again.

Octavia talks about Nyko's son, Artigas, and how there are not many people his age because there was a plague that went through the villages when he was a boy. "I think he wants to spend time with us. I mean, we're all the same age, so he probably misses having friends like that."

Clarke nods relaxing with the heat and helping Octavia dry the roots until Marc takes over.

"Bellamy's looking for you," Maureen says. She was two days away from her review before the one hundred were sent to Earth. Clarke is not sure what it is that she did, but she promises Clarke that she would have been floated so coming down to Earth was only a little bit better. Her face is thin and long, but it looks drawn.

"You okay?" Clarke asks, reaching forward.

"Yeah, just did not sleep so good last night." Maureen carries a container full of dry clothing on her hip. She leans away from Clarke's touch.

"Okay, well, if you need something I have enough mint and chamomile stored up that I would be happy to give you some," Clarke offers, smiling at bit and trying to seem less like a domineering leader and more like a friend.

Maureen doesn't seem to like the efforts because her smile looks like a flinch before she leaves to distribute the cleaned clothing.

"Laundry is worse than drying herbs," Octavia notes.

Clarke agrees and goes off to find Bellamy.

He is in the tunnels, hammering in the next support beam. Dirt showers down on him and Bennett. He stops, blinks, uses the back of his hands to rub at his eyes and continues. Clarke sees an eye infection ready to happen, but she supposes Bellamy has already had one during his time on the Ark. For many of the janitors, it was common to get eye infections because a majority of the archaic protective gear was distributed towards the engineers, mechanics, chemists, and medical personnel instead of the janitors. At least four times a year, large numbers of janitors end up in the med bay with eye infections from irritants. Some came in with breathing problems because particles got into their lungs. Clarke saw more than one person die because the allotted amount of antibiotics was reached and no more could be administered without breaking the law. Those patients ended up suffocating on the fluid that built up in their lungs.

Clarke waits until the beam is in place and Bellamy hands off his hatchet so that additional support beams can be wedged into place. "You called?" She raises an eyebrow and follows him to a less busy sector of the tunnels.

"No, but if you wanted an audience princess, you could have just asked." His lips tilt up as does his chin, teasing her.

She copies the motion, but the smile falls faster from her face. "That's weird, Maure—"

A rush of powerful air knocks them off their feet. Their heads knock together and she is throwing up before she realizes it and she chokes in dirt, dirt, dirt. Where is the air?

"Bellamy!" she coughs out.

"Fuck, I'm here, I'm here!" but he sounds really far away. There is a pressure against her wrist, but she cannot see it. Everything is brown and black. She feels bugs crawling in her hair and over her back. She shivers and coughs. Her eyes tear trying to rid themselves of all the dirt. Next is the screaming and shouting, but really it just feels like another wave of nausea. Nothing comes up this time as she gags.

"Oh my god, Clarke." Someone is lifting her up, but her wrist pulls down and she cries out.

"Dip shit! It's caught under a rock!" The pressure on her wrist is relieved and her arms is slung across bony shoulders. It is Jasper, but she cannot see him. She feels the fluttering of his pulse.

Bodies brush against her and Octavia is telling Bellamy that she has got him, but he is yelling at everyone else to "Dig those people out! There are at least seven people under that shit. Get them out!"

"Jasper," Clarke rasps. She tries to spit the mud from her mouth but it ends up just dribbling down her chin.

"I got you Clarke it's okay. We're gunna get you to the med bay and then..." He does know what will happen then, but she does. She will patch herself up and then get to work on everyone else.

"Are my fingers moving," she begs. She still can't see, but she feels when they emerge out of the tunnels and onto the surface of camp. The air rushing into her lungs helps with the paid "Jasper, look and tell me if my fingers are moving."

He whines and says yes. "Is that a good thing?"

Clarke's feet miss the ground and she pulls harder down on Jasper. Someone takes her other side to balance her between two bodies. "Yes," she pants. "Yes, it's good."

She blanks for a moment and then someone is shaking her awake and pushing cold water over her face. "I can't do this without you. I need you awake, Clarke." Octavia has tear tracks but she looks angry. "What the hell is happening." It does not sound like much of a question to Clarke, but she is having trouble focusing her vision.

"My wrist, did you clean it and bandage it?" She is not sure Octavia heard her until the acute sting of moonshine is introduced to her mangled wrist and she howls in pain. "Keep going," she grits out. Octavia obeys.

Another person is brought in and Clarke hear their wheezing. "Octavia." She pushes the girls away, but she pushes her weak arms away. "You need to help them; Get them sitting up and make a straight line between their lungs and trachea."

Clarke opens her eyes and she isn't sure what she is looking at but she fumbles around enough to realize that she is sitting up right and not lying prone as she originally thought. She blinks a few more times and realizes that it is not her sight that sees only brown it is what she is looking at that is covered in brown. It is someone from the accident. She can't discern any markings and the person goes unnamed, but Octavia is pulling them to the side of the drop ship to do as Clarke ordered.

She looks down at her wrist and for a second she can't breath. The skin in mangled and blood keeps mixing with the dirt in her lap. Her fingers twitch. That is enough of a good sign for her to take the cloth Octavia left behind and start wrapping up her wrist. It is strange how quiet the drop ship is compared the cries and shouting leaking in from outside. Quiet...

"Clarke, he's not breathing! What do I do?" Octavia is crouched in front of her.

"There is nothing you can do," she grits out. She hates how dirt grinds between her teeth. She hates how she has to give up on this person's life. How she has given up on people's lives already. And here she is, making bets and playing God.

Octavia slaps her. She knows this because her cheek did not hurt before, but it hurt after. "Clarke how the hell do I save this boy?"

"Bring me to him."

And she does. It turns out that he is breathing. Clarke sticks her fingers down his throat and he gags and Octavia rolls him to the side pounding his back. He keeps wheezing and Clarke still is not sure who he is, but at least now he is fighting. And if he is fighting, so will she.

* * *

**Author:** Well, I hope that one was fun. Sorry if it dragged a bit in the beginning, but I wanted to take the time to work out the relationships more to provide better foreshadowing. Foreshadowing for what? Well, I guess that means you have to keep reading ;)

Thank you all who continue to favorite, follow, and review. It's always lovely to hear back from my readers so that I can gauge your thoughts and reactions. Enjoy tomorrow's mid-season finale!

Fish


	10. Chapter Ten

**Note**: I think ya'll are gunna like the next few chapters. Let me know what you think, though.

* * *

**The Person (I should have been)  
Chapter Ten**

"But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries,  
has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner  
that needed it most, out one fellow and brother  
who most needed a friend yet had not a single one."  
Mark Twain

* * *

Bellamy's outside of the tunnel entrance, lying on his stomach because his back aches too much to sit up. When the ground collapsed in, the force of the wind and debris slammed into his back. He doesn't think he is bleeding too bad or at least Miller doesn't think so because he obeys Bellamy's command to dig their people out. Corpses or not, no one would be left behind. The first body they bring out is still alive even though Bellamy would have missed the body in all the dirt and mistaken it for a mass of hard ground. It was a good thing he wasn't the one digging.

The next one that comes out is not alive. He knows because Ulric has them over his shoulder and sets them down right outside of the tunnel before diving back in. People haul out dirt that they piled on blankets to clear things away. Part of the wall was destroyed from the collapse. There is a gap in their defenses and it bothers Bellamy as much as the bloated eyes of the corpse beside him. The head is smashed and he cannot tell who it is. But Earth does that. It took them in and changed them until they skin blisters and scars arise and callouses build and muscles develop. Even in Death they continue to change. He coughs and coughs and his lungs squeeze down on him. How can he stop this? He tries to push up off the ground, but he flinches and collapses down on to the ground because his back spasmed and locked. Even if he could ignore the pain (which he can't), it seems as if a disconnect occurred between his body and mind. One wants to lie here and sleep, another is compelled to stand up and help. The compromise is him, lying at the entrance, eyes open and mind alert.

People come out with more dirt than bodies and it gets dark. Torches are lit and all keep working. Two in a row came out alive, but one has a mangled arm and Bellamy finds himself judging whether or not Clarke might be able to patch that victim enough so that they can continue their fight against this cruel, cruel world. He listens to the grunts and sighs and shifts of soil. Few people make any noises. Bellamy wonders if anyone is guarding the wall. And who has the guns? His back hurts so much and he breathes in fast and quick because he doesn't want to pass out, but he isn't getting enough air into his lungs. Was breathing suppose to be this hard? He never thought so.

Two more come out dead. One is Drew and he looks like he is just sleeping. No crush head or snapped neck, just blue lips and closed eyes. Finn is the one that takes a tarp and lays it over the dead until they can be burned.

Miller and Ulric make a stretcher to carry Bellamy to the drop ship because he can't control his limbs, let alone stand or walk. They both sway and stumble, exhausted and depleted of not just their energy, but of their adrenaline stores. (Bellamy judges it's been four hours since the collapse.) He hisses as he's jostled. Everything is dark and the fires are coals because no one pays them much mind as they struggle to find the final person (body). On the way up the ramp, Ulric trips and knocks Bellamy's shoulders hard enough that he passes out.

When he comes around again, nausea bubbles up hard and fast. When he throws up, he's grateful to see that it is not red. That it's not blood. He is on an elevated cot, too, so he just lays on his stomach and hangs his head over the edge and lets the vomit drip from his mouth.

"Can you drink anything?"

He can't shake his neck because it is so stiff. He grunts.

"Okay, I have to cut your shirt off Bellamy. I need to check your back." Clarke hand is freezing when she touches the back of his neck and scratches lightly at the base of his skull in a moment of trying to calm and comfort him. He grumbles something about wasting time, but does not resist. Only her boots are in his line of vision and he notices the treads are almost gone and that her shoelaces are too short for her to tie her boots up all the way; she compromises by tying them up half way, but no wonder she gets so tired fast when hiking. Those boots just drag on the ground and weigh her down. She works slowly and he hears the slice of scissors as she begins to tear at his shirt. Dirt showers down on his now exposed back and he shivers. It hurts enough that he gags again.

If he angles his eyes up enough, he can see Octavia and Marc surrounding the other three survivors. Yancey sits on a chair and shakes so hard that the water in his cup just ends up spilling over and creating streaks of dirt and pale skin down his hands and wrists. Across the room is Hillary with her mangled arm, puffy and purple from the broken blood vessels contained inside of her skin. Clarke instructs Raven to make periodic cuts to help relieve some of the pressure and pain before the bone might be set. Raven's tanned skin ashens, but her hands are as steady as they would be if she was working with metal and wires and plastic instead of flesh and blood and bone.

Marc sits with his hand against Quinn's chest, feeling the heart beat because the pulse is too weak in the neck or wrist to detect (besides, Marc doesn't even know how to find it and Clarke doesn't have time to explain).

Bellamy gasps as fingers prod along his sides. Clarke grunts, "I think some ribs might be fractured and you're back is bruised as hell, but you're okay, Bellamy. You're okay." Cold water is dribbled on his back. He is not sure if it is pain or relief that he's feeling as she takes the cold cloth up and down his back. Her thigh presses into his side as she sits beside him and works. He likes the feeling of their bodies touching because it means he does not have to doubt that she is alive.

"What about your hand?" he slurs, exhaustion closing in. He closes his eyes because looking at his vomit on the floor makes him sick all over again.

She says something and he doesn't understand because he thinks she said, "I'm not sure" and how can she not be sure about her hand? Is it okay or is it not?

He brings a hand under his right shoulder and levers himself up onto his side. Clarke tells him to stop being an idiot, but he needs to see what she means that she's "not sure" even though he almost passes out from the pain of moving.

Her blond hair is brown with dirt and he thinks he sees a spider crawling in the frizz by her temple. In one hand she holds the cloth and her other one's strapped against her chest in a sling. He sees the finger tips and they're blue. It looks like the cloth wrapped about her wrist is wet, but he can't tell what from because the it's so dirty. He's willing to bet that it's blood. Her eyes are red and irritated. The force of the collapsing ground hit her in the face and several impressive gashes dash across her face. It is obvious she hasn't taken the time to take care of herself and clean those cuts.

He closes his eyes, focuses on breathing for a while because damn he shouldn't have moved. Half of his body feels free and light the other half is crushed down by the weight of the organs making getting air into his left lung particularly tricky.

"What are we doing, Princess?" he wheezes. "Trying to keep everyone alive? We're just setting ourselves up for failure."

She sags into the cot. "Yes, yes we are," she agrees. Neither of them would have it any other way. She lays a hand on his forearm, her fingers squeezing into his skin. He twists his wrist so he can hold on to her, too. He finds it unfair that she touches his skin all he feels is the gritty touch of her dirty long sleeve.

"I want a bath, dammit," he sighs.

Her laugh come out fast and almost like a hum. "I want a hot shower."

"Got something against bathes?" He can't see her anymore because his eyes are closed and he isn't sure if he enunciated his words enough. He falls asleep before she answers (or maybe he just can't remember.) When he wakes up in the middle of the night to see her sleeping in a chair, her hand on his neck.

* * *

A day passes until people start questioning why it happened. Nori finds himself taking refuge in the drop ship in attempts to get away from the more vocal delinquents who blame him for the collapse of the tunnel. Murphy ends up being the one to defending him. Bellamy sits in a chair backwards so he can lean his chest over the back. It's not comfortable, but it's better than being prone on the cot or enduring the pain of pressing his back against a wall.

Octavia rotates hot rags on his back and each time she puts a new, warmed one on he feels his shoulders relaxing and sinking down. Clarke sleeps on the cot. She was up all last night trying to purge Yancey's body of whatever poison he took in attempted suicide. Her fingers are still blue and she keeps her back to him when she treats her wrist with seaweed or whatever other concoctions she has. Only when she needs to tie the ends of it together does she ask for help. Typically it's Monty and typically his mouth is a harsh, white line across his tanned face as he ties up the sling, not liking what he sees, but respecting Clarke too much to question her about it.

Bellamy attempts to keep people active by scavenging for anything else that was buried in the collapse. Several tents that were on the surface were sucked into the sinkhole, half of Raven's base, too. She says if it was any bigger, they whole camp would have exploded because of the amount of jet fuel and gunpowder housed in her workshop. He supposes they were lucky in some things, but he wants to brainstorm with her a safer and more stable position for her workshop to be placed because Bellamy refuses to rely on luck next time.

Nori plays with the bottom of his shirt like a child. (_He is fifteen_.) He keeps mumbling and his eye seems to wander more than it normally does. Or Bellamy is just noticing it more because he's exhausted and keeps getting distracted.

"Talk to me, man," Bellamy says, gripping edge of the chair to keep upright.

"It shouldn't have happened," Nori pushes out.

"I don't care if it shouldn't of happened or not, I care about why." His sister presses a rag hard into his back. He hisses out, "Really, O?" She glares and tells him to listen.

"No, I mean that when I designed it, the way building was progressing, there was nothing wrong," Nori explains. Finn comes into the drop ship carrying moonshine. He looks around the group and skirts the edges. He's here for Clarke. He adjusts her blankets. She twitches in her sleep and doesn't wake.

"So there was nothing wrong. Then wanna tell me what did go wrong?" Bellamy grunts. His ass is falling asleep and he hates how much he has been sitting. He bobs his leg to try to distract him from all the pent up energy.

Nori glances at Murphy, who is looking down at his nails, bored. Bellamy doesn't like how Nori defers to Murphy. "Is there something you want to tell me, Nori?" he prompts.

"It's just, that…Okay, it could have been two things: a mistake. A miscalculation. Someone failing to put the support beams where they needed to actually go."

The idea of it being a screw up makes his palms sweat. He helped put in some of the support frames— was it him that messed up? (He doesn't doubt it.) Bellamy doesn't hear the next option because he thinks about how he adjusted the beam and put it in and the framework around it...did he forget a peg or maybe not put a beam in straight?

"What?" he asks once he recovers enough to notice the strange looks from those in the drop ship, even Murphy pauses to look up from his dirt filled finger nails.

But Nori misunderstands and blabbers on to explain the second option and how he came up with it and it isn't until he says, "We've tried to kill each other already, so it is not that far of a logical jump to assume that maybe this is a result of delinquents being delinquents," that Bellamy catches on to what this faux-architect proposes. Hate sings down Bellamy's back and settles in his stomach. He stares at his hands because he can't stand to look at Nori who is suggesting that one of their own sabotaged the tunnels on purpose. He tries to reason away the explanation, "There was no explosion."

Nori keeps looking at Murphy. "Well, yeah, but you don't need explosions to cause a collapse."

"Do you understand what you're suggesting?" Clarke is awake; she shakes her head, refusing Finn's help as she pushes up from the cot, watching Nori. "If what you're saying has merit, do you know what that means for us as a camp, as a group? We're suppose to be watching out for each other."

"Oh, is that what you've been doing," Murphy grunts, getting bored of picking at his nails he looks up, hands clasped in front of him like a lecturer.

Bellamy growls. His head aches and he thinks he needs a nap despite his racing thoughts and bouncing legs.

"I can't apologize for what happened." Clarke doesn't look away from Murphy's face. The marks of torture from the grounders have faded into small scabs and pink scars.

"No, you can't," He agrees, but he relaxes back on his heels and doesn't say anything else as Nori is forced to go through the scenarios of the collapse again. Bellamy is relentless in his questioning and finds all of Nori's answers unsatisfactory and vague. He admits this. Nori lurches forward, and Bellamy jolts back, but his back can't hold his weight so Octavia and Finn end up being the ones to catch him and bring him back to his prone position against the back of the chair. He is sweating. Nori kneels and implores to Bellamy that it wasn't him. It wasn't him, he promises (But what's a promise down here?).

Clarke tells Nori to go to the second floor of the drop ship and get some sleep. She is the only one that noticed the bags under the boy's dark eyes and his shaking hands that Bellamy attributed to nervousness rather than sleep deprivation. "Murphy," she calls him back in before he leaves. "You will keep an eye of Nori; protect him when we can't?"

Murphy pauses, lips pursed, but nods. "You got it, chief."

Finn asks Clarke how her wrist is. "Healing," she answers, but does not let him see it. Bellamy thinks that Clarke's definition of "healing" varies too much between her and her patients.

"Any updates on how the wall is coming?" Bellamy says. Finn fills him in on the progress.

Clarke tells Octavia to get Marc so that she can take a rest.

"I'm fine," Octavia protests as Finn gets distracted from telling Bellamy about what has been scavenged, how the building of the pyre is going, and overall mood of the hundred. Miller's orchestrating all of this and doesn't have time to report in, maybe Jasper would be a better informant? Bellamy will ask for Monty to drop in.

"Go get something to eat. Go kiss Lincoln. Argue with Raven. Just leave this place for a second," Clarke begs.

"Only if you do."

Bellamy can see the tilt of Clarke's head and the uplift of her not-smile smile even though he isn't looking in that direction. He can see when Octavia leaves though. Finn forgets to finishes debriefing Bellamy.

"Come on, time to lay down." Clarke's hands are under his arms and on his chest as she guides him up. Finn starts helping when Bellamy's knees buckle and Clarke hisses because her wrist is jostled too much. Bellamy leans more on Finn than on Clarke. He collapses on to the cot that is still warm from Clarke with a yelp of pain, but he rather get it over in one push than a slow drop than have his muscles straining against the effort to just collapse.

His stomach growls and Clarke asks Finn if he could get food for everyone in the drop ship. Bellamy asks for Monty. Finn hesitates in leaving. Bellamy would hate to be the errand boy, but Finn obeys out of some hopes of...what Bellamy isn't sure and he rather not think too deeply about the Princess' romantic interests. (But he is not blind and sometimes he watches on purpose because it gives him a hundred and one reasons more not to pursue her, as if he didn't have enough.)

"We need to keep people away from Nori," Clarke says, sitting down again by his side. They're not touching this time.

"Okay, we'll do that, but we need answers, Princess. If this was his fault we can't just ignore it and tell him that it's not a big deal and have him go back to building the places where we're suppose to live."

"How do we get answers without causing a riot like last time?" _Like with Murphy_.

Bellamy doesn't have an answer and he doesn't get the chance to admit this to her because she has to get up to check on Hillary. The girl cries. Her arm still has poor coloring, but Clarke declared it would not be amputated as long as infection doesn't set it. Hillary cries because she remembers the press of the dirt and the moment when her arm snapped and when she lost sight of Drew who was working beside her. This is much worse than the physical pain. Bellamy looks up at the ceiling though it is terribly uncomfortable to do when you are lying on your side and your neck is sore from getting debris slammed into it. He tries to give Hillary privacy in this moment. They all deserve time to deal with what happened in their own way. And if now is when she needs that time, he is more than willing to give it to her.

Finn comes back with food before Bellamy and Clarke can finish their conversation. Spacewalker helps Bellamy rearrange his limbs so that he can sip at the broth brought in for him. Bellamy is grateful it isn't meat or anything solid. He still vomits when the pain catches him off guard. Monty smiles at Bellamy when he follows Finn in. Like Bellamy thought, he does a better job at reporting in, able to give the specifics that Bellamy wants. Yancey is awake and yells at Clarke for saving him and begs her to kill him. Finn frowns and scolds Yancey, bending down to give him some food too. Instead, Yancey smacks the food away, causing it all to spill on the floor. Bellamy hears Clarke's huff and say, "If you didn't want it, fine, but don't waste things like that. It could have been given to someone else."

Yancey pouts and he doesn't apologize; Finn complains about ungrateful people. Clarke makes him leave instead of thanking him for bringing in the food.

"What's up with you two?" Monty asks. He shouldn't have asked. Clarke frowns and her nose lifts up. Bellamy doesn't want to know the answer to Monty's question. And yet he asked and Bellamy will listen. He is grateful that she's still across the drop ship forcing broth between Quinn's lips. He woke up sometime last night and Clarke tried to coax him out of his delirium. He went back under early in the morning and has only defecated since then. Clarke put up a screen and handled the sexual abuser like Bellamy handled Octavia when she was in diapers.

"Nothing," she says and Bellamy doesn't believe her because the way Finn looks at her doesn't mean nothing, Bellamy should know. Maybe to her it means nothing, though, and Bellamy supposes he can accept that answer as enough. For now it is enough, at least. He knows it will not last. This platonic touches sate him because they don't have time for complicated feeling, but with the treaty with the grounders still shaky and a possible saboteur within the one hundred, he does not have time to ignore things either and procrastinate because soon, he worries, it might be too late.

He almost kissed her at the crash site after Ron was murdered as she starred down at the imploded head. Then before that, with the virus, he just wanted to hold her. And before that, when they walked back from the exchange with Anya and the guns, he wanted to hold her hand as she told them about her drawings in the sky box not because he thought what she was describing sounded beautiful, but because of what he knew she was not telling them about all of her sketches (like the drawings of the dead in her field notes).

* * *

The next day he is able to sit up on his own. Standing takes a lot out of him, but he makes it to the reconstructed wall and back into the drop ship by leaning on Miller's shoulder. He's sweaty and disgusting by the time he's back inside, but he needed to get out. Not just for his sake (because he is not sure how much longer he can stand being in a space where there is nothing to distract him from Clarke and her blue fingers), but the one hundred needed to see him. Needed to know that he will survive and they will move on. He convinces Clarke to be the one to go get breakfast so that the delinquents see her outside of the drop ship, too.

Their display of healing convince the group that they will move on from this. People nod and smile and would go to slap him on the back, but Miller stops them from doing something stupid. Jasper and Monty take brunch inside the drop ship claiming it was too cold outside. Bellamy thinks that they are lucky that it is just cold enough to get away with that lie. Munroe grumbles out excuses and asks Clarke questions. Miller tells her that everyone is fine, that everything is fine, and that she needs to just rest for a second. Clarke doesn't seem to understand what he's saying though and just pats him on the shoulder and says thanks.

Bellamy gets her to sit down with him in the afternoon to talk. They start with things about the camp, serious things, but the conversation dissolves into chatter about the food paste on the Ark; how her dad smelled at the end of the day; the sweater his mom sewed for him; passing her placement test at twelve; the places he found as a Janitor.

"I thought you were a cadet," she says. Her cheeks are redder than he likes. His arm brushes hers and he can't tell if she has a fervor or not. They sit on the cot they alternatively sleep on, looking out at the patients on the other side of the drop ship. Marc rotates Quinn's body. He developed a bed sore. Yancey stares off. Hillary sleeps on her side. Someone sings about a lion man and a few of the hundred who know the song chime in for the chorus.

"I was, until Octavia was discovered and sent to the Sky box. I was stripped of my position and forced to work for the custodians." He tries not to get angry at the thought that it was _her_ people on the Ark that showed no mercy to the one child only rule. He needs to remember that they're the same and there's no Ark or Walden or Phoenix or Stations here. There is the one hundred, and then there is everyone else. Clarke doesn't apologize or say how much that sucks. She nods and asks him about the places he found and if he was ever able to scavenge anything cool.

He tells her about the time he found colored glass and how he didn't take it back to his cabin because he didn't want anyone else to see it. He says something witty about his old supervisor and she chuckles, a light heaving of the breath, but it is enough that it leaves them both grinning and softens the lines of their faces.

They both fall asleep at the same time that night on the cot they've been sharing because it's the most comfortable and because Bellamy is not going to question the Princess if she wants to sleep with him. He ends up on the inside. He stuffs a layer of blankets between him and the metal wall to stave off the worst of the night's chill. She sleep on her back while he sleeps on his stomach. The wrist that was crushed by the rock sits on her belly. Unwrapped.

He stares at her hand as she sleeps. The whole top of her hand was ripped off and it's one black scab with the edges around her wrist looking a little red. Her finger tips are no longer blue and he supposes that counts for something. (It has to.) Maybe she was telling the truth when she said it was healing? Someone put up a barrier between Yancey and Hillary and Quinn to give them some privacy and although no material could be sparred to sanction off Bellamy and Clarke's cot, a stillness exists on this rectangle of polysynthetic fabric and metal, as if they were the one's granted total privacy rather than the patients.

He falls asleep staring at her breasts, wakes up with a hard on, and pretends he's asleep when he feels her shift in the morning. He likes to think that maybe she watches him, too.

* * *

Lincoln shows up three days late and five days after the collapse. Octavia punches him and refuses to give him a kiss or a hug. Bellamy approves. He hunches, holding the ribs of his left side as if he can hold in the pain, before their main fire, turning meat periodically. He is surprised when Lincoln seeks him out. Octavia must have warned Lincoln about the hostile feelings that have revamped in the one hundred since the collapse because, they reasoned, if it wasn't an accident then it had to be the grounders. The reason many of these people aren't leaders is because they keep forgetting that they are their own worst enemies. Clarke and he haven't done much to dissuade them of these theories though.

"When you were being chased," Lincoln begins, still standing. Bellamy doesn't strain his neck by looking up. He keeps it relaxed and forward and turns the meat. "Did you hear drums?"

Bellamy scoffs. "Shouldn't you ask Anya that? She was there after all."

"Did you or did you not hear the drums?" he repeats.

Bellamy stops and tilts his head far enough to peer up into Lincoln's face. "I did," he confirms, anxious about the information that is about to be divulged.

"They are called the Reapers," Lincoln describes, messing with the angles of the roasting kills until he is satisfied and everything was as it was before. He crouches on his heels rather than sitting on the log. It is less permanent and easier to spring up. "The reason many of us do not live in the tunnels is because they are connected. That is how the Reapers travel, by sneaking around. It is better that you don't live underground, so it's good the tunnels collapsed."

_Is he trying to cheer me up? _Bellamy thinks, but is frustrated that Lincoln or Indra or any grounder made no mention of these Reapers until after their lives were in danger. "Why the hell didn't you say anything sooner?"

"It is none of our business to interfere with the running of your camp."

"By withholding information like that?" The meat starts to char and Bellamy doesn't let Lincoln turn it.

"The people who shot at you, they were probably the Mountain Men." Lincoln raises his palms to the fire to warm his fingers. "The Mountain Men are like you, I think, different and ignorant about this Earth, but with technology that was lost in the apocalypse."

Bellamy bristles at being compared to this unknown enemy, but thinks about tea to help relax his muscles more or hot stones on his back instead. He scratches at his hair, feeling dirt collecting under his finger nails. He hasn't washed in two days and he knows that if he hasn't then when was the last time Clarke did?

"They are both enemies and will always be enemies. They don't make compromises and they lie and tell you things as sweet as honey and none of it are true." Lincoln is looking at Bellamy when he says these things. "Make sure your people know this because Mountain men might make promises they only mean to break."

"What the hell is that suppose to mean?"

"It might help flush out the pest problems you've been having." Lincoln stands. Bellamy is uncomfortable with how much Octavia told Lincoln. She might not know about the list and the bruises Bellamy saw on Donna's neck, but she knows how to be quiet and to listen. He taught her those survival skills on the Ark. He grumbles out something about Lincoln minding his own business, but they both know it is not serious, not with how much Bellamy lists to the side trying to lessen the pressure on his fractured rib.

Lincoln leaves. Bellamy wants to tell him that they're not done talking yet, but Jordan tells him that Clarke is looking for him.

Bellamy catches her eye as soon as he is in the drop ship and he knows someone is dead. "Who?"

"Nori."

"What?"

"It looks like he committed suicide," she explains. Her wrist is not in its sling, but she cradles it against her chest, protecting it. This is the first day that she is leaving it out to air. He adds this to the list of signs telling him that Clarke is getting better. She stands in the middle of the drop ship, the farthest point from the patients and yet she is encircled by those who need healed and cannot get away. "And Yancey."

"And Yancey," he curses. Can he be upset? He feels happy for them in a way, some how jealous they escaped, but then angered that they left, left Clarke and he with the burdens of their deaths and to be the ones to tell everyone else that two people saw there was no hope to their situation, that death was right there around the corner and that they might as well beat Him as His own game.

Clarke steps next to Bellamy. She leans in and he can smell her body odor but does not find it unpleasant and it's probably because they all smell bad, not because she smells good.

"It _looks_ like Nori committed suicide," she repeats, looking at him with her summer sky blue eyes. He glances to his left where Hillary is sitting, trying to eat her meal with one hand. She whines every time she knocks her broken arm.

"You gotta be sure about what you're saying, Clarke." He thinks about the argument they had in a tent once. The knife and fingers that were found pointing towards Murphy, but it was not him. Can they do that again?

Clarke worries her lip. Stops, rolls her shoulders back and says, "I think it's something to investigate."

Bellamy rolls his eyes. "And how do we do that? We don't have those types of resources here and we can't just speculate!"

"I know!"

They are shouting at each other and neither realize until Hillary coughs the type of passive aggressive cough that Bellamy hates people do when they want his attention.

Bellamy moves so his back is to the annoying patients who don't realize that they are no longer patients (and Clarke doesn't either). Clarke is sandwiched between the drop ship and him. "What makes you think that it's not the grounders?"

"What makes you think that it is?" she challenges.

"I'm just asking questions, Princess, that is all. Can't get upset over that."

"You're asking the wrong type of questions, Bellamy!" He steps forward. Most people step back, of course Clarke steps forward, too. He can see how the scab on her wrist keeps cracking and leaking blood. (_Should it do that? _He does not know.) "Why would someone sabotage us?"

Bellamy crosses his arms and looks down. The floor of the drop ship hasn't been cleaned since the Virus ended. "To scare us into submission. If someone wanted us dead, we would already be dead. Someone wants us for something."

Clarke touches his arm. "And Nori knew that it wasn't an accident. He could prove it to us and now no-one else can."

"What about Yancey?" he asks, thinking, pulling what he knows together into a pile of puzzle pieces just dumped out of a box.

Clarke looks over Bellamy's shoulders at Yancey's shrouded body. "It might have been another honest suicide attempt, or maybe a distraction, or maybe there's something more going on that we don't know," she figures.

Bellamy is nodding though he isn't really sure why because it's as if a part of him understands how these things connect, but another part of him is still trying to catch up. "First we take care of our own," he says. "I'll round some people up to collect the bodies and get a pyre ready, again."

"It shouldn't be too much of a problem," she says, glancing over his face and the cuts on his neck, her fingers brushing against them to feel for heat or swelling.

"Why?" He turns his head to the side so she can look at the worst of his cuts that extends down behind his ear.

She pauses and looks into his eyes. "Because the embers are still hot from the last one."

Bellamy shivers. She hasn't moved her fingers from his neck.

* * *

**Author: **I've referenced some songs already in this story, can you spot them? The quote I used at the beginning of this chapter is precious to me. This chapter was more than difficult to write and balance out. I've noticed that I've focused explicitly on these two characters sometimes, which makes me sad because I love all the character of the 100 in their own, damaged way.

Oh, and that mid-season finale, eh!?

Hope you enjoyed this update; please continue to review and let me know the goods and the bads and the favorite lines or parts where you were confused. I love to hear it all. My favorite part is the description of Clarke as she works on Bellamy's back after the collapse. ;)


	11. Chapter Eleven

**Author:** Wednesday's episode. That is all.

* * *

**The Person (I should have been)  
Chapter Eleven**

"There are no innocents. There are, however, different degrees of responsibility."  
Stieg Larsson, _The Girl who Played with Fire_

* * *

Bellamy doesn't tell Clarke what Lincoln said to him until after the gathering at the pyre and once she forced broth down. He's chewing on a potato; the one hundred mistook the root for a collection of pretty flowers when they first crashed on Earth.

"What does he mean 'promises'?" She slurps and doesn't feel ashamed. What about eating is shameful anyways?

"Princess, if I knew, we wouldn't be having this conversation," he sighs, putting the remainder of his potato on a dented metal plate, disinterested.

Clarke frowns. "You should finish that. It'll give your the body the energy it needs to heal."

They sit on their cot in the drop ship. They're alone unless you count Quinn. Hillary asked to leave the infirmary this morning, explaining she can't stand being beside a comatose Quinn. "It's just too damn depressing," she said. What does she want Clarke to do about it though? His vitals are solid and his eyes react when she shines a light on them. Does Quinn think he's 10 feet under? Clarke gritted her teeth and told Hillary she would be around to check up on her arm.

Bellamy snorts, "You really can't be saying that type of crap to me."

She elongates her spine. "It's true."

"So what? Can't take your own advice?" He nods to her cup of broth. "When was the last time you had anything solid?"

Clarke isn't often honest with herself but she has always been honest with Bellamy. "Before the accident."

Their knees are touching and they have been doing that a lot lately, touching. Clarke is grateful for it. It helps keep the craving and desperation at bay because she is able to remember that she feels alone, but she isn't. Sometimes that's enough.

He sighs out her name.

She looks to the entrance. An extra layer of fabric hangs heavy and rocks were strung to the bottom so it was weighted down instead of fluttering in the wind. Clarke asked Ulric where he got the extra fabric from; he said Bellamy. She likes having him in the drop ship with her. Giggles drip down from the floors above them. Although she isn't sure if she likes having to share all the space with everyone else. (Everyone else: those who doesn't see her more than a pair of hands to heal him or her with.) Finn hasn't joined them inside. Raven tries to convince him otherwise and Clarke is grateful his stubborn streak holds in more places than just in his love life.

"I can't keep anything down," she admits. "I can eat it and then it settles into a hard ball in my stomach and it hurts so much that I force it up."

Bellamy can't keep his breathing quiet. He doesn't talk and gives her the chance to get this all out because it will be the first time she's admitted her problems. "And I don't know when it started, Bellamy, but I don't think it's just because we got buried. When it is my turn to have an egg, they go down easier, but I couldn't do meat unless it is burnt after Wells and it got harder and harder putting that down." She catches his eyes and holds it, dares him to laugh, to feel pity. To call her weak.

He grins and says, "I can't drink Monty's moonshine. I feel lightheaded and out of control before I even take a sip. The smell of it makes me anxious and my hands shake and my heart pumps. I end up just hovering over Octavia if I get a strong enough whiff of it because I feel wired and terrified. And I don't know why Clarke. I don't know why."

She doesn't know why either, not really at least. She might be able to dig up some spotty knowledge on what they are going though, but why name it? It helps them pretend it isn't real and that they can make it through. She puts the cup down. The broth is cold and fat floats on the top. She won't be able to drink any more without getting sick.

Bellamy breaks the last half of his potato and hands it to her. "You eat this half. I eat this half. A good compromise?"

She lifts her eyebrows. "And what if I don't care for potatoes?"

He scoffs, "Then you came to the wrong place, Princess."

Her face softens and the headache behind her eyes loosens into a throbbing. It takes her a long time to finish the potato, but they talk about arranging another meeting focused solely around these Reapers and Mountain Men. Lincoln was cryptic, making them suspicious. The Grounders hated these people so much they warn even the Sky People about them.

* * *

When their group of seven arrives at the meeting place, it's Ricky who identifies the ruins they stand under. "The Lincoln Memorial, holy shit." He skirts around the Grounders so he can touch the lichen covered stone. Maureen, elected by the one hundred as a representative to keep the leaders in-line, grumbles that it's no big deal and directs her face to the ground, but Clarke sees her glancing up every once in a while. They are all awed by the fact their ancestors built something like that. It seems like such a waste to people who can't even build a place to live, but it also speaks of the great prosperity their ancestors might have once lived in because they were able to waste their resources to built something as grandiose as that.

Octavia joins Ricky and soon the four gathered Grounders are telling myths about the man sitting in this chair.

"It is believed that his statue is made to reflect his stature and deeds. A great man and great accomplishments. Peace reigned because of him," informs a grounder.

Ricky opens his mouth, ready to correct them that Lincoln never reigned because he was a President of the United States and that yeah, this guy was tall, but you really think he was a giant like his statue? Oh that actually, during his time as president he was at war with the other half of the country over states rights and he was assassinated before he was able to enjoy any amount of peace. Bellamy shakes his head at Ricky. How can these people conceptualize being at war with their own country covering thousands of acres of land when they don't even have states or Capitalism? Ricky enjoys the stories anyways, and Clarke begins to bounce her leg. Miller heaves a sigh, ready to get this over with as much as Clarke. He doesn't have a gun with him, only a knife at his waist. They stored his gun in an evergreen tree, deciding walking into a meeting with the grounders looking ready to blow their heads off might not be the impression they want to give if they are trying to garner information. Monty hangs back with Clarke, smiling so his dimples indent his cheeks. She is happy he smiles as he does, that he takes the time to smile.

The conversation about the Reapers and Mountain Men go smoother than Bellamy and she predicted, but doesn't start until after camp is set up and dinner roasts over a fire.

"Reapers raid and kill and eat," Doug, a scout, says. He wears a hood made from a fox's head. The blue of dusk manipulates the. Its eyes have been replaced with dull stones. The blue of dusk manipulates it into life, watching the Sky People as it balances atop Doug's head. Clarke finds herself starring more at the fox than paying attention to what's being said.

"So what makes them such a big deal?" Miller asks.

They all sit on the ground and Bellamy braces his hands against his knees to help support his aching back. She looked at it this morning and most of the contusions were changing color at this point. A good sign, but for him it was not good enough. He wanted to twist, move, and sleep normally without having to be conscious of protecting his back so he can avoid unnecessary pain. Clarke tells him it will be a few more days. She does not tell him that it will actually take another week and a half before his days are not accompanied by pain because of the rib he broke. She knows her wrist will take longer to heal. With so much skin sluiced off at once... she estimates it to be a month, but sometimes she gets this tingling sensation in her fingers or tries to move them and it takes a few moments longer than normal to get them working. This is something she also hasn't told Bellamy.

"They eat their prisoners," Lincoln says, adding fuel to the fire. Octavia puts her hands up and scoots her toes closer. The cold will be worse on the way back to camp.

"Cannibals?" Maureen whispers. Her long face drawing down and the blood peels away until not even the tips of her ears and nose are red with the cold.

"Beware of the tunnels to the East, that is where they like to live. If you plan on excavating any other tunnels like you are the one's at your camp, then you must tell us first. Some of our older people know which tunnels connect to what. Some we have purposefully blocked," Doug continues. His beard is not long like Nyko's. He is young. Maybe close to Bellamy's age. No-one corrects him that the tunnels failed and they're not likely to continue working on.

Bellamy readjusts. He has trouble keeping still for even short periods of time right now. He says he never had problems with it before. He has never been so restrained by his physical body. Clarke pretends to use his shoulder as balance as she stretches her legs out from underneath herself. She doesn't squeeze, but just reminds him that she is here. She settles back down as Jessa, their story teller, regales them with bed time horrors about the Reapers. Ricky in enraptured. Maureen turns her head away and Miller yawns. Octavia smiles at something Lincoln. Clarke watches them over the tops of the flames.

"What of the Mountain Men?" Monty asks. Doug's fox focuses its eyes on him. Bellamy shifts closer to Monty, rubbing his nose to make it seem more casual and less defensive.

"The Reapers work for them. We think," Wayland says, a thinner grounder who has a limp. She likes his green eyes. "The Mountain Men...we don't know what they want, but they abduct and most the time our people don't come back. Often, the Mountain Men make promises. About babies and lovers and such things that can't come true but you hope they do."

Clarke listens to Justin and takes what he is saying as seriously as if Bellamy was the one telling her these things. This skinny boy has trouble keeping his eyes raised and he stares over their heads, looking for something that they can't see. _He's been there before_, she thinks. _He speaks from experience_.

"What did they promise you?" she risks asking. The fire crackles. Jessa frowns and Ricky seems confused that a person who smiled and joked about Reapers flips into a growling warrior.

Wayland's cheeks twitch. Clarke marvels at the many reasons a person smiles. It represents hopelessness or disgust as much as happiness. She sees broken promises in his smile. He admits, "I don't remember, now."

They move on to other topics of conversation like technology ("Advanced," Wayland supplies. "More than what you have apparently."), and how often they interfere ("At random intervals." Lincoln shakes his head. The fire glinting off his bald head. "There is no pattern to predict."). Clarke rubs her eyes as Bellamy's questions dwindle and her wrist begins to throb. Clarke realizes how fast darkness settled into the forest. She can't see anyone face, even in the firelight. Shadows encapsulate their voices. It's Lincoln that calls a halt to their discussion.

"We can continue it in the morning if necessary," she reminds Bellamy when he begins to tell Lincoln that he isn't done yet, thank you very much. Octavia leaves with Lincoln. Bellamy frowns and looks away into the darkness of the forest and Miller explains to a confused Ricky that they only set up three tents and that, yes, that means they're going to share. Maureen doesn't like the idea of being paired with Clarke, but likes the idea of sleeping with one of the boys less.

Miller's scoffs, "Jeez, I almost forgot who's the princess here."

Maureen flushes and takes a moment to be ashamed, lingering by the fire as Clarke settles down into their lean-to. She pulls a blanket over her shoulders and wishes she could take off her shoes. It was only an eight mile hike to the meeting place, but with packs stuffed with food and shelter for a night, her feet could use some airing out. It was too cold for that and she finds solace in knowing that she will at least get a full night's without being roused to inspect injuries or answer inquires. (Though, that's happening less and less with Bellamy and she sharing a bed.)

* * *

Cold air blows down her side. She gropes for her blanket, finds it, and curls it around her. It is nice not having to share a blanket. She lies on her stomach and tucks one hand under her neck to keep it warm and the other one she protects by having it align with her breast, elbow bent. A corner of the blanket flips up and down with the wind. When she fell asleep there was no wind and now there is. It is nice not having to share a blanket. She doesn't remember what she was dreaming, but she can still taste the garlic paste Monty made to put on top of their meat to add flavor. She knocks her wrist, hisses, and adjusts. but it is nice not having to share—

She opens her eyes and all she sees is dark, dark, dark. Maureen and her had to share a blanket and Maureen refused to be touching. "Well at least get closer," Clarke told her, "The body heat will help keep us warm."

She complained that having her own blanket would keep her warm. Bellamy told her to shut up and go to sleep. Clarke pushes up and cracks her scab. She does not have time to acknowledge the pain, though it makes her fingers go numb.

"Maureen?" she calls. She doesn't try to be quiet or pretend. "Maureen," she shouts. She looks to the camp fire. It's dull and the coals have settled. No one has been guarding it for a while now. Who was the last one to be on shift— "Monty. Monty Monty!" she starts saying because he would not just leave and wander away.

Someone grips her arm and she bucks against them. Miller lets her go only to grab at her again when she gets ready to bolt (_Where are her people?_) Bellamy shakes a groggy Ricky who can't seem to understand what is happening and how important it is at this moment in time to get up, get up, get up.

Bellamy kicks up the coals and adds anything that he can to the fire to make it brighter. Miller grips Clarke as she strains against him into the darkness as she shouts for Maureen and Monty. Lincoln and Doug and Octavia are there, breathing hard and straining to ask what happened. Bellamy yells at them, accuses them. Octavia stands between the grounders and her brother telling him needs to calm down and stop over reacting and to start thinking.

Clarke stops shouting. She relaxes into Miller's grip. She hears him sigh, but she hears something else too.

"Clarke?" Bellamy whispers.

She hears it—the sniffing and sobbing. She rips out of Miller's hands and is off. She hears it all around her and she trips, but she only stumbles, still searching for the noise. Someone pulls her up and to the left.

"Stop! We have to—" she begins, but Bellamy is not pulling her back towards camp.

"This way." He leads her to the crying.

It is Maureen, collapsed on the ground, weeping and covering her face. She rocks herself. She has nothing with her and for some reason her feet are bare. (Clarke remembers it's because Maureen refused to wear her shoes to bed even through they would help keep her toes warm.) Her hands periodically go up to tear at her short brown hair. Bellamy and Clarke descend on her. Bellamy holds Maureen's hands back and Clarke pushes her fingers around he body checking for any damage.

"What happened, Maureen? Do you know where Monty is?" Clarke swallows the acid in her throat that wishes it was Monty and not Maureen that they found. She finishes with her preliminary inspection by the time the others come with torches and her findings are confirmed: Maureen has a black eye inflicted by someone, but all other damage, such as the scrapes up and down her arms and the clumps of hair missing from her head, are self inflicted.

Clarke steps back so Octavia and Bellamy can take over to try to pull the answer out of Maureen. Clarke paces. Heel to toe. Heel to toe. Octavia looks at Bellamy and Bellamy is looking at Clarke. She can't hear what Maureen is saying, it sounds like the incoherent babbling, like the noise of rushing water over rock.

"What? What is it?" Neither of the siblings explain and they don't have to because Clarke starts listening and hears, "They promised. They promised me. Promised. Theypromisedtheypromised."

Doug and Lincoln face out into the darkness, torches lowered so the light won't blind them. They circle the group, but don't try to be quiet. The Mountain Men, if they are still out there, know where they are either way.

Clarke crouches by Bellamy. Octavia holds Maureen, rocking her. Petting her hair and cooing into her ear. Clarke latches on to Maureen's chin. Her eyes focus for a moment. "Where is Monty, Maureen?" she says, demands, pleads.

"They promised they would take me," she hiccups. "But they just took him and forgot me! Why?" She covers her face again. "I told them everything they wanted. I gave them names, but why won't they take me?"

It's Bellamy who holds Clarke back. He hugs her to hold her. She tries to push him off. "She's a fucking idiot," he hisses into her ear. "A fucking idiot and we can't do anything about it."

Clarke puts her head on his shoulder and growls into his neck teeth scraping along his skin and tasting the sweat and dirt from the collar of his shirt, "We get Monty back. We get him back and then deal with her." Her hands are up in his hair because she knows he can't handle pressure on his back yet.

"Your orders, Princess," he agrees, voice angry and spiteful.

Miller has Maureen on her feet and hands tied behind her back. Doug and Lincoln never interfere. Ricky sniffles because of the cold (or maybe he is crying because it hurts to be betrayed by one of their own because down here they only have each other dammit). They go back to their lean-tos, break them down, and spend the rest of the night dozing off. Clarke stares up at the statue, sharing the frustration of trying to get people to cooperate and compromise and then having to deal with the consequences when they fail to do so.

* * *

Lincoln accompanies them back to camp along with a boy named Wight and an older woman with lines in her face, but no gray hair who introduced herself as Nanjemoy. The grounders split the delinquent's packs between them so everyone carries lighter bags except for Maureen whose hands are tied behind her and has enough trouble walking. Clarke doesn't trust to give her any of their supplies, anyways.

"Lead us home, Ricky," Bellamy says. He picks at gunk that crusts his eyelashes.

Ricky nods, looks a few ways and Wight ends up pointing where the trail begins. It is a long way home, but thankfully, that's all the guidance Ricky needs before he gets his barrings and moves with ease through the forest avoiding traps that he marked off as the one hundred expanded into the woods. Nanjemoy comments the grounder may have to improve their traps if they are so easy for the Sky People to detect. Clarke isn't sure if she is teasing, though.

Clarke thinks there is fog ahead, but as they approach, she realizes that it's smoke. The smell is powerful and heady and sucks the moisture away. Miller hefts the gun they retrieved to his shoulder and takes off the safety and saddles up beside Ricky, who pauses for the first time since they started moving four hours ago.

Bellamy grunts at him to move forward. Clarke tells everyone to cover their mouths, "We don't know what's in the smoke," she defends. Even the grounders do as she says. She's the one who puts a rag over Maureen's face. Her eyes dart left and right, looking for something. Part of her hopes this traitor finds it. The other part of her, the part that keeps coming back through no matter how much damage this Earth does to her soul, is curious as to _why_ because Maureen has never shown signs of instability and her crime on the Ark was relatively benign (unauthorized pregnancy; Clarke doesn't know if the fetus was carried full term or not).

They move deeper into the smoke and the temperature rises. The gate is open and any wood of the wall is scorched and smoldering. They step through. Inside, tents are crumpled masses and melted fabric. Dirt is in an upheaval and pot holes exist where they didn't before. Clarke wonders if it was Raven or someone else who set off the bombs that caused this damage.

She doesn't see any bodies, but that is because they had yet to reach the drop ship. Three bodies lay outside of the closed door and Clarke has a hard time identifying what killed them because the fire scorched their bodies so much. Bellamy shouts and bangs on the door only to his hand pull away. The metal is still hot. The hydraulics of the drop ship activate and the door lowers. Doug unabashedly stares. He wasn't here with Indra's original group and hasn't seen the technology of the Sky People.

Finn rushes Clarke; she flinches back, but relaxes once she realizes that he isn't a threat. He asks her if she is okay, hands on her shoulders, her cheek, her arms. She asks where is everyone else. Finn looks at Maureen. "Why is she tied up?"

"Stand guard," Bellamy instructs Nanjemoy and Wight before jogging passed Finn into the drop ship. Clarke dislodges herself from his grip, pulling the cloth from her mouth and watching sweat drip down Bellamy's neck. Finn didn't answer her question. Inside, Clarke counts another three bodies, but she can recognize the dead this time: Sterling, Harper, and Quinn. Sterlings skull looks like it was kicked in. Harper's intestines push out from her skin. And Quinn looks like he had a seizure when no one was paying attention. (_Does knowing who is dead make it easier?_)

_Where was Marc? _she thinks, but he's leaning against a leg of the table, clutching his leg. Clarke can't tell if he pulled out an arrow or if he got shot.

"Where's Raven?" Bellamy asks. He unties the cloth from his face, a line of ash emerges, separating

Finn keeps trying to get Clarke to look at him and answer his question, "Are you okay?" She wants to say, _No_, but stays silent instead.

Monroe shakes her head. "I don't know, we had to leave some outside."

"How many are missing?" Bellamy says. His voice is too low and Clarke watches him and his hand at his hatchet.

Monroe shuffles and doesn't look in his eyes. "I don't know how it happened," she says instead. Her braids are loose and large chunks of her hair fail to stay in the weaves. She limps around the drop ship, unable to stay still. Clarke thinks she might have sprained her ankle and that having her rest it would make it heal faster, but having Monroe sit would be impossible at the moment. Bellamy taught Clarke when to pick her battles.

"The smoke house caught fire and we were trying to get it under control and it was fine until people started screaming and someone was shooting and there was this red stuff." Monroe looks to Clarke, her green eyes demanding an answer and explanation. Clarke had no lies to tell her nor did she have any truths, so she begins to tear out the materials she can and puts Lincoln and Octavia to work patching up the handful of people in the drop ship.

"Monroe." Bellamy leans forward. "I don't care how it happened. I wanna know our numbers. I'm not blaming you."

"I got seventeen into the drop ship before the red smoke," she says, eye darting between looking at Bellamy and looking at the bodies rigid with rigor mortise.

Neither Clarke nor he ask, "That's all?" It would be cruel to someone who has never been in the position to sacrifice all for the collective.

"I closed the door, then. I heard people banging on it. Shouting. But I didn't open it up," Monroe chokes. She scrubs at her eyes.

"You did what you had to," Clarke tells her. Bellamy's hand fists around the hatchet. He nods in agreement.

"I don't know," Monroe tells them. "Raven ran into her tent and I was trying to get everyone else into the drop ship. She's the one that probably set off the bombs." A grin slips onto her face. "I hope some of those fucking bastards are dead."

The hatch up to the second floor squeaks open. "Oh, good! It's just you guys." Jasper climbs down the ladder, tangling his legs for a moment, but he staggers towards Clarke, hugging her. "About time you guys got back." He goes to Bellamy, but stutters at the glare, so embraces Ricky instead. He skips Finn, but his arms are still wide, ready to hug one more person. Clarke can only see his back and his long, thin neck. "Where's Monty?" He knows the answer to the question already. Knows that if Monty isn't here right now then that means he is either dead or was taken, implying that he could be dead very soon.

"It was the Mountain Men," Bellamy says.

"Is that a tribe of Grounders or something?" Monroe sniffs.

Clarke begins working on Marc's leg. He passed out as soon as she probed his wound, but it looks clean and congealed nicely. She thinks he did a pretty good job patching himself up. She feels proud knowing that he wasn't as incompetent as she assumed when he ended up giving one of the guys Queen Anne's Lace instead of the chamomile like he was instructed to do. She keeps moving then, the conversation in the back of her mind, trusting Bellamy to fill everyone in. Doug touches the metal of the drop ship and some of the wires. The skin between his eyebrows is smooth and maybe she guessed wrong on his age. He is younger than Bellamy. The autumn sun finally makes an appearance, filling in the dark corners of the drop ship and a gust of air brings in the acrid smell of smoke. Clarke coughs, wipes her mouth, and keeps bandaging Mikey's wrist, one of the remaining who crawled down from the upper levels. She is worried he might have fractured it, but there is no way to tell down here on Earth and bone marrow poisoning becomes a very real possibility.

Finn stands beside her when she moves away. "Why would Maureen do this, Clarke? She must have a good reason. We can't just tie her up without an explanation."

"Can she explain away betraying us?" Monroe snaps, barring her teeth to Maureen.

"That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you just jumped to conclusions. Maybe the Mountain Men aren't bad? Maybe they want to help us. Maybe it's not them at all." Finn defends.

Bellamy scoffs, "Yeah, well whoever it is, people don't get killed and kidnapped if they wanted to help us."

Clarke stares at Finn's wide, brown eyes and thinks that he is too innocent for this world of acid storms and deadly organization. She worries where the innocence might lead. "No, Finn, I don't think so." She unties the cloths from her neck, wrist pinching at the angle. "Marc got shot with a bullet. I can tell by the entry wound. Unless it was one of us, we know that the Grounders don't have access to those type of weapons, ruling them out."

Lincoln adds, "This is what the Mountain Men do. They come in fast and use tricks to disorient and scatter people before disappearing."

Doug finds Clarke's medical journal and starts flipping before Bellamy follows her line of sight and snatches it away from the curious Grounder, grumbling about manner. Doug holds his hands up and smiles in good humor.

"Now what?" Jasper speaks up. He is looking at the bodies. To think that Clarke and Monty cleaned this together with moonshine clogging their nostrils.

"The dead are gone. The living are hungry." Everyone looks to Doug. Lincoln nods. This is something the Grounders have heard all their lives. They sleep with it at night and drink it in their water. Bellamy catches Clarke's eye. _Can we learn to do the same? _they ask each other.

* * *

**Author: **I need tragedies. The 100 feed me and then I'm left craving more. It is a cruel cycle, I tell you. Waiting for an update was probably was horrible for you, too, though. So I suppose we're in this boat together. Thank you for all you commented on the last chapter. The feedback blew me away and humbled me. (Do you think we can break 100?!) To all my readers who do or don't favorite, alert or comment: it's incredible to think of how many people my writing is reaching. Thank you for allowing me to enter into your lives in this small way.

Also, yay for officially being renewed for season 3!


	12. Chapter Twelve

**Author: **Shorter, but with more movement and bellark~ get pumped for tomorrow's episode.

**The Person (I should have been)  
Chapter Twelve**

"Some things you can never leave behind. They don't belong  
to the past. They belong to you."  
Rick Yancey, _The 5th Wave_

* * *

Nanjemoy doesn't have patience as Doug lags behind to trace his fingers over the wires of the drop ship again. Wight punches Ricky on the arm. They both smile, a friendship built over making fun of each other with cloth over the mouths and see who can find the hottest piece of metal from the fire. Clarke had to treat them both for several burn on different occasions. Bellamy griped about needing to learn lessons, but he didn't resist calling the boys over to show off a patch of smoldering coal Bellamy found under a melted mess of plastic.

Having the extra help scavenging allowed Clarke to focus on preventing infection from setting into her patient's wounds and gave Bellamy an extra two hours sleep so that he could function during his waking hours. But they don't have any food except for their stores on the third floor. It was supposed to be for winter. Miller broke into the hatch and brought down the salted meat, dried roots, and pickled turkey eggs.

Bellamy wants Lincoln to report to his leaders so that the 100 can garner support in tracking down the taken ones. (A tiny part wants to stop sharing their food. The larger part has to do with Doug's persistence in being around Clarke.)

"Thirty nine," Bellamy sighs. How did we lose thirty nine people?

"But why only thirty nine?"

"What, that's not enough for you, princess?" They wave off the Grounders. Octavia tails them to the edge of the camp and stands there until the fog of the morning embraces them.

Clarke's the first one to stop waving. "They had the opportunity to take us all, so why not?"

Bellamy doesn't like this thought. He doesn't like the idea that he might have had the chance to be with his people, wherever they are. Instead, he's stuck on the outside trying to figure a way to them and there are too many unknowns. He hopes Ulric will be able to keep those idiots alive long enough so that they can figure out a way to break them out. Break them out of what, he does not know, but at least he has a goal, a place to start. (Considering them already dead is no place to start, so he doesn't.)

It feels like he is stalling, doing little things that need to get done. But last night, they did need to sleep. And they still need more information about where the hell these Mountain Men are holed up and Doug promised he would call a gathering, but Bellamy doesn't like the idea of waiting, waiting, waiting.

Maureen is no longer bound up, but despite pressure to work, she refuses and sits on the ramp to the drop ship, staring out. He doesn't like how drawn her face is, how her cheeks sag and she sinks her head between her knees. It has been hard on all of us and Bellamy is having a difficult time understanding why the girl thought betraying everyone was worth it. Like Finn said, there has to be a reason why…but Clarke has not gotten through to her, so he sure as hell doubts he will be able to.

It's Monroe who figures it out. Bellamy works on putting up a low wall with the several hands willing to crawl out of the drop ship. Clarke boils rags in a pot. It is raining. Monroe grabs Clarke and announces, "Little missy is pregnant." She pulls Clarke back to the drop ship. Bellamy cuts them off.

"What does that have got to do with anything that's going on?" He stops Clarke from going forward because they need to talk about this dammit. Clarke just sees a patient that needs attended to when really, they can't forget that Maureen's the one that endangered them, too.

Monroe doesn't hold back as she divulges the fears Maureen has, "She thinks that you would make her get rid of the baby. She thinks you will kill her like you killed Donna so you won't have to worry about the hassle or a crying infant."

Bellamy steps back. He sees Octavia and Ricky working to get some meat cooked. It is easier to feed twenty-eight people, but all he can think about right now is the softness of a baby's cheek, the curve of their bellies, their snores…but Monroe is talking about Clarke, not him. The realization bursts in his stomach and up his throat. Maureen thinks those things about Clarke (like he did). Her cheeks and forehead are red while the rest of her face is white. Her eyes are steel gray and he doesn't stop her this time when she moves forward, but only takes away the stick she was using to stir the pot. She glances at him. The steel in her eyes isn't just a color.

He stops Monroe from proceeding forward, though. He hands off Clarke's stick and says, "We've still got work to do."

He hears yelling as he goes back to work, but it's not Clarke's voice that's raised. Finn watches the door to the drop ship, a bundle of wood in his hands. Bellamy doesn't understand why he waits. Clarke will let them know if she needs their help. Okay, that's a lie. She won't let them know. Anyways, the wood is getting wet.

Bellamy's back aches. The pain reaches down into his legs. He isn't ready for this type of labor, but then again, Clarke's wrist keeps cracking and bleeding and he's still not convinced that it was only a flesh wound because her left fingers twitch too much.

When Finn sits with Clarke at dinner his hand goes to her knee. She brushes it off, shaking her head, but not moving away. Bellamy tries to keep his back on them as much as he can. He needs to get out of this place of gray walls and gray ash and gray eyes. He needs green and blue and their people. Clarke goes to sleep before Bellamy's guard shift is over at dawn, but he pushes her over and falls asleep with their shoulders and hips touching.

* * *

Lincoln doesn't come back for another three days and Bellamy argued with Clarke a dozen times over things he can't remember. He still doesn't know what Maureen said to her. He isn't sure that he should know because he needs to protect Maureen and her baby, but he needs to protect Clarke, too and those two things haven't been matching up. (Could he choose?)

But he likes it less what Lincoln tells him, "They agreed to meet in five days."

"No," Bellamy says. Clarke stands by his side. She cradles her wrist today. His back twitches. He would really like hot water or rocks on his back, but he isn't sure how to ask for something like that.

Doug smiles, his forehead wrinkling too much. He doesn't understand. Bellamy hates how he came with Lincoln. _Doesn't he something better to do?_

"We can't wait," Clarke clarifies. "If these Mountain Men are as bad as you say, then we need our people out of there as soon as possible."

Doug shrugs. Bellamy wonders if all Grounders are tall. Aside from Bernard, he hasn't seen any other short grounders. Even the women are above average. Then he remembers Clarke, who might be shorter than him, but impresses him for other reasons than her height.

"You leave now, you will wander, and you will die," Doug says. He hovers over Jasper who tries to repair the radios Raven made. Jasper glances up at the imposing grounder too much to be making any progress. He twitches and touches his nose, giving away his discomfort.

"We wait and they die," Clarke reminds Doug, taking a seat beside Octavia who braids her hair to hide the grease and tame the frizz.

Finn purses his lips. "We're no good to them if we can't save them," he chimes in. He's right and Bellamy hates the logic of it because it doesn't align with the tremors of his body or the churning of his stomach. He needs to move and keep moving forward because this standing still with ash around his boots and his fingers numb from the cold isn't okay.

Doug hones in on Monroe when she brings in a platter of meat. He reaches for a piece, but Monroe slaps his hand away. "Try asking nicely," she sneers.

"What?" The hood of his cape is crumpled against his back so that the head of the fox is indiscernible from the rest of the fur on his body.

Monroe rolls her eyes. "_Manners_."

Jasper snorts, hands still over the electronics. "That's Mahogany!" he mimics in a high voice. They laugh while Doug frowns, looking away and angling his body to Lincoln. Bellamy smiles, watching how the Grounder slipped from a composed hunter to a grumpy teenager who didn't understand a pop culture reference (even if it's a century old).

It's midday and too cold to be standing outside. Bellamy is by the door so he can get the strongest cross-breeze. She smells it, too. He sees it when Clarke closes her eyes and sniffs at the air. The pine needles and the mud overpower charcoal and ash in random intervals.

Maureen sits outside. She hasn't moved and sometimes Bellamy hears whispers of "They promised. They promised. I did everything they asked, didn't I?" The hair raises on his neck, and he rubs his arms to try to get feeling into them. He gave his coat to Rachel who was sleeping in a t-shirt when they were attacked and lost all her clothing in the fire. It's easy to excuse it as an action to warm up.

"There has to be a way to move faster," Clarke insists. She hasn't touched the food in her mess kit, but she is drinking whatever tea they boiled over the fire. Bellamy supposes that's something. He keeps chewing the meat, spitting out the gristle when it grinds between his teeth.

He eats to keep his mouth full so he doesn't talk. His mother taught him better than to talk with his mouth full and right now Clarke can be more polite. Well, maybe she is just as irritated as him, but she wouldn't punch anyone. Okay, she hasn't given him any reason to believe that she would at least. Either way, he trusts Clarke to do what is necessary.

Doug repeats everything that Lincoln already told them about the Mountain Men. Clarke's lips are in a tight line and Bellamy keeps on chewing. He flexes his fingers. It's too cold not to have gloves.

"There has to be something else we're missing," she persists.

Someone screams, shouting for help. They all move, rushing out at once and tripping over Maureen who says, "They came!"

The shouting continues and Bellamy gets out in front of them all. Finn pulls back so that he's holding Clarke from moving forward, warning her it might be a trap. Bellamy knows she shakes him off, because she is there pushing him to his feet when he slips in the ashes. Her hair is loose today and he follows behind her as it flicks back.

They find them because they trip over them. Murphy clutches his legs and Raven is unconscious on a stretcher of metal and broken branches.

"What did you do to her?" Finn shoves Murphy into the ground, but it's not that far of a fall; he was already kneeling. Bellamy pulls Finn off, but his eyes are on Clarke, watching as she assesses Raven's condition. She doesn't say anything. Finn keeps asking her questions.

"Shut up," Bellamy tells him. "It's Clarke, trust her to do what she needs to do." Birds still chirp with the sun up and the Cardinal moves along the branches. Doug takes the opposite end of the stretcher when Clarke gestures him to and they heft Raven up together.

Raven shouts and then moans, but doesn't wake.

"Raven!" Bellamy lets Finn go to her side. He holds her hand that is purple and ashen.

"About time you found us," Murphy says and Clarke's laugh shakes as much as her hands do as they move back to the dropship and their inadequate medical supplies. Bellamy is left alone with Murphy who has tear tracts starting at the corners of his eyes, but nothing falling down them. His hooked nose looks broken and old blood is wet again from sweat.

Bellamy doesn't ask if he can walk. Instead he says, "Which side do you want me on?"

Murphy squints up at him, debating if Bellamy was going to shove him down once he helped him up. (He kind of wants to.) "The left."

It takes a while to get going because Bellamy's back still aches and having one of Murphy's arms latched on his shoulders just compresses the pain into a tight, radiating ball. Bellamy stops to let Murphy readjust and that's the only time they quit moving.

Bellamy heart beats fast as he drags Murphy up the ramp. Maureen is gone, but he notices that the way he notices the smell of his body odor now. Raven is on the table, her shoes off and Clarke is touching her toes. "Now?"

"No," Raven hisses. She looks straight up at the ceiling. Finn holds her hand, but he is looking at Clarke as she stands at the foot of the table, shaking her head. Not good news, then, Bellamy surmises. Marc gestures them over to a mattress against a eastern wall. He can't walk well with his injury, but eventually he will be able to. Raven might not at all.

Murphy lies down on mattress, prone and tells Marc to do whatever the hell he needs to do. He falls asleep as Marc is rolling up his pant leg. His ankle is swollen and red with dark purple splotches. Bellamy doesn't have to be trained to know that the way Murphy's shin bone presses upon the skin isn't normal.

"Get me something to prop it up, will you?" Marc used to have long, ratty hair, but he shaved it all off when it started itching (Clarke ordered him to really). Bellamy obeys, but is distracted when Raven screams as Doug and Clarke work to turn her to the side. The blood is not very bad, so maybe it is not as serious as he thought, but Clarke shakes her head again. Bellamy bends to pick up a pillow, but freezes on the way up, pain arresting him for a moment until he can take the time to breath and remember that the pain passes and that he's healing. It hurts to keep moving, though. He really needs the hot rocks tonight. Octavia rushes in and out with boiled water, preparing for whatever Clarke needs. Lincoln's stare keeps the curious remaining delinquents from crowding the space.

Marc holds two, short metal rods in his hand and a length of ripped up fabric in the other, but he does not move to fix Murphy's leg.

"Well," Bellamy says, "Waiting for a divine blessing or something?"

Marc doesn't get the joke. He looks right at Bellamy and says, "I can't do this on my own. I need Clarke. How can you expect me to do this on my own? With out her."

Raven cries again. Bellamy won't turn around. He focuses on Marc's broad cheeks and cleft chin and scars on his face he developed after the Fever. His green eyes are wide and he holds the splinting materials to Bellamy. "She has to do it," Marc insists.

_We all need her, _he thinks.

Bellamy pushes the fabric and metal back at Marc. "You can and you will do this on your own. She trained you for a reason."

"To only assist her!" Marc has the beginnings of a good beard growing that Bellamy doesn't have time to be jealous of.

"No, she trained you because she saw potential in you and she believed that if it came to situations like this, and she wasn't around, that you could be there for us instead." Bellamy wishes that's all it took to convince Marc to just do the splint on his own. When he stood up to interrupt Clarke's work with Raven, Bellamy yanks him back by his shirt, threads popping and stretching the fabric even more. "Don't you dare go bothering her."

Marc clutches the splinting materials and shakes his head. "I'll do it wrong—"

"Then do it." Bellamy clutches at his pant leg to keep himself upright. His back. Damn, his back will not support him from much longer. "You just tell me what to do and I'll do it."

Marc nods fast and says, "Hold him down."

And Bellamy does, though Murphy whacks him in the ribs before he passes out from pain all over again. From there it's easier and Marc's wrapping becomes more organized.

When Bellamy looks up again, Jasper's hand is on Clarke's shoulder and her head is in her hands. He stands too far away from her to be of comfort, but it was always Monty that did those types of things wasn't it? He was the one that hugged and reassured with a squeeze on the arm or a pat on the back. But Monty was gone and so was Miller and so was Sean and so was Jordan and so was Maureen—

"Has anyone seen Maureen?" He shouts. He doesn't stand. He can't. He needs to lay down. Probably not sleep because there's too much to do, but at least lay down because he knows he will be collapsing soon enough and he needs to retain some dignity while he's in so much pain.

No one answers his question. "Who?" a few mouth.

Clarke frowns. "No one saw her leaves? No one?"

Eyes examine the floor or the walls or the ceiling. No one dares to meet the storming blue of her eyes but Bellamy. Raven is asleep on the table and Finn is there, but his eyes don't leave Clarke. Octavia volunteers to lead a handful of people on a quick scouting expedition and Bellamy is too exhausted to go with them and Clarke can't leave Raven in her state. Doug and Lincoln promise to bring all the scouts back.

"Alive, preferably," Bellamy says, his voice cracking and his eyelids drooping.

Doug chuckles and no one else does.

* * *

He wakes up on his stomach. He doesn't realize why his back is so relaxed until he opens his eyes to watch Clarke wrap smooth stones in rags and place them along his back. Almost all the lights are off in the drop ship and a curtain is drawn around where Finn sleeps beside Raven. Murphy and Marc sleep with a branch between them because they kept arguing about boundaries. They both snore.

"Shouldn't you be sleeping, princess?" he says, his voice muffled because his face is shoved against a blanket. Her wrist is wrapped up again.

"I will," she says, readjusting stones based on his groans and moans and bodily reactions so they are placed in the most strategic areas. She pulls up a blanket so he feels it brushing the bottom of his ears. It makes him a bit itchy.

She stands up. "Join me, Clarke." She looks back at him, her nose scrunched. Although they fall asleep together, neither of them talk about it. He wants to move past that.

"Take off your boots. Lift up the blanket and lay down," he instructs. She obeys. The flashlight she has propped up gives off more of a blue light than a yellow one, and he sees Clarke for a moment as he might of if he ever met her on the Ark. He hates what he sees. Then, there is the dirt, a scratch along her cheek healing from the collapse, a knot in her hair. He smells her feet after she takes off her shoes, but it doesn't smell any worse or better than his so he welcomes her in. He doesn't smile but watches instead as she lies on her back and turns off the flashlight. He watches until he can make out her outline, but the heat from her body is stronger than her image so he soaks that in instead.

He feels the rub of a toe on his ankle and he doesn't move. Doesn't breathe or blink. He thinks Clarke has holes in her socks that she hasn't stitched and that they are cold and maybe he should have had her keep her boots on, but going to bed with your shoes seems so wrong to him. Even if it's a little representation of safety and security that they don't have to fall asleep with their shoes on, then he will take it and fight for it because it's the little things that help him remember that he is human, not the great speeches or the adoring girls.

Then Clarke sighs and he breathes in her exhale. She turns to her side. He cannot see her eyes, but he feel the brush of her breasts against his arm and how her hands find a cold space on his back to cover. He reaches out to her to, his hand ending up on her hip. It's inappropriate, considering their relationship, but at the same time, it's right. They are connected by judgments and decisions and pain. It's romantic in the sense that their relationship is impractical. They probably argue more than they agree, but they are visionaries. He knows this. They want things for the one hundred that is based in the facts of half trained students and foggy memories from classes. Bellamy knows they are both guilty of focusing on their feelings: Murphy's hanging; Lincoln's torture. Small examples characteristic of how their passions push them. He worries about their passions consuming them.

He squeezes her hip under the blanket. She sighs, "What Bellamy?"

"Don't do anything stupid," he says.

She snorts. Her breath washes over his cheek and nose. "You're sure good at giving advice, but not following your own."

"Then we'll work on this together," he says, shifting. His nose touches skin and he is not sure if it's a cheek or a nose or a neck.

"I want them back, Bellamy. I want our people back." He realizes that he's touching her jaw. "They had no right to take them. Even the druggies. The murders. They deserve more than the sky box and being treated like science experiments and living with empty stomachs and losing each other. Miller should still have Donna, with or without the baby. That would have been her choice, but she didn't choose that death." Her breath smells like chamomile, but it's the sounds of her voice that soothes him.

Bellamy presses in. The angle is tight for his back, but he needs to get her to stop saying these things because it's what he thinks about all the time. "You're right, but what's that going to do?" He says this into her neck. When she speaks next her dry lips brush over a scab on his forehead, "Nothing." He presses in.

"It does nothing," he repeats, but he is admitting his own weakness into the dark with whispers and heat. The cold breaches their cocoon. He shivers. Her hand reaches down to his against her hip and fits her fingers between the gaps in him. It's not perfect, but it is better than it was before.

They fall asleep and wake up and Clarke complains about her arm being asleep and they start another day.

* * *

Maureen comes back that day, smiling and skipping. Bellamy grips the gun (their only gun). But there's no one with her. Her shoelaces are untied. They will ruin faster if she keeps them like that. She says hello to Finn as he helps Raven eat.

"What the hell was that," Raven croaks.

"Not sure," Finn says, but keeps encouraging her to eat. ("Clarke said you need your strength." "Strength for what? Can't you see? I'm going to die.")

Bellamy puts Stewart on Maureen. The kid nods and keeps nodding as he walks away. Bellamy cleans his gun on the third floor of the drop ship. It's empty of their winter stores because it has all been used to fill their bellies. There's no panther rug. It was taken down stairs and is on the cot he shares with Clarke. Now, she sits across from him, flipping through her field journal and medical records catching up on paperwork (noting who died and how and if she used any treatment on them and the results of such treatment).

"Bellamy, about Raven—" She gets up and closes the hatch, making it darker inside than he would like, but the lights up here are softer and yellow. He can see her eyes and that's enough for him as he moves from glimmering piece of metal to glimmering piece of metal. "Her pain is getting worse." It's not an explanation and he waits because she isn't done. She has to reach the point where everything spills over and he will wait for it to wash over him. "Her pain is getting worse and I'm worried about her legs not moving, but I'm worried about infection or internal hemorrhaging."

Bellamy doesn't have grease to oil the gun with. He thought about trying the animal fat that Clarke collects to rub over burns and healing scar tissue. She tends to forget to put it on her own scabs so they continue to crack and bleed.

"I don't think she will survive a surgery, but if I don't try then she might die anyways because I left the shrapnel in." Clarke's head is between her knees and her hair really needs washed. "How can I make this decision?"

"You can't."

She looks up at him. He stops cleaning the gun and says, "It's Raven choice, you have to ask her."

"But if she wanted to go through with the surgery, Bellamy, how can I do that? I doubt my skills when working around the spine. It's so vascular and innervated that any wrong move—it would be on me. The scalpel I have can't be sharp enough let alone sterile," she goes on.

He shakes his head. "Don't think about that type of shit right now. You have to ask Raven before you go to those places." He continues to work on his gun. "No point in worrying about that."

Clarke touches his shoulder as she leaves. Her notes are on the floor. He can't hear what she's saying below, but he knows she's talking to Raven, laying out the facts in successive order with the cool demeanor expected of a trained doctor.

It takes her longer than he expects for her to come back up and he starts reading through her files. It's intrusive to look through these notes. They are as much a private journal as they are medical records. He's done it before and she's seen him, too, and she doesn't stop him. But this is the first time he realizes that there's no entry for Clarke Griffin. He frowns and holds her pencil in his hand. It is still warm. He has trouble writing because he's only used to styluses of the Ark. The scratching sends strange vibrations up his arm. He writes:

Name: Clarke Griffin

Age: (He leaves this blank because he is not sure.)

Crime: Treason

Eye color: Blue

Hair color: Blond

Medical History: (He is not able to fill this section up before she is coming over the lip of the hatch, he doesn't hide what he was doing. He hands the pencil back to her and watches as she finishes what he started.)

"What did she say?"

"She wants to go ahead with the surgery."

Bellamy stops her hand from writing because she's shaking. "What do you need?"

"Monty's moonshine." They only have a little remaining. "Echinacea and Old Maid's Nightcap would be good, but I am not sure how much help they would be towards her. Garlic, too, for after."

"I'll find someone who can help you look for them or I'll try to learn. Either way, you'll be prepared for the surgery. I'll try to sharpen the scalpel," he offers.

Her lips twitches. "The metal is too fragile for normal sharpening, but thank you, Bellamy."

"Anytime you need worthless offers, you come to me, princess." He grins, trying to get her to smile more. (He has a feeling she smiled last night and he missed it in the dark.)

* * *

**Author:** How's the pace? Next chapter is killer and I can't put off bringing the adults down any more. They just mess everything up, don't they?

Thank you, thank you, thank you for all your love in all its form and fashions. My smile is ridiculous when I see alerts in my email. I look forward to your feedback so that I maybe able to get a read on what you might expect (and not expect~). Continue to be amazing and I will do my best to follow your lead, oh, reviews, alerters, and favoriters. 'til we meet again.


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